Anglian Learning, an East Anglian multi-academy trust, partnered with Olio, a British food redistribution startup, to help reduce food waste by sharing surplus food from Cambridgeshire and Essex secondary schools with local communities.

With the help of Olio's”'Food Waste Heroes,” users of the Olio app can request freshly prepared meals from surplus school lunches for free. The Food Waste Heroes would collect excess food and upload it to the Olio app, where nearby residents would pick it up.

The collaboration comes as Anglian Learning works to significantly reduce its carbon footprint in accordance with the Department of Education's sustainability and climate change strategy.

Anglian Learning plans to roll out the Olio scheme to the remaining nine primary schools by the end of the school year, following the pilot across the Trust's six secondary schools, which saw under 200 meals redistributed to numerous local families.