A food sharing app is looking for volunteers in Helensburgh to help them cut down on the waste of surplus food in the area.

Worldwide anti-waste organisation Olio says it has recently begun working with defence sites across the UK, with its volunteers collecting surplus food and redistributing it among local communities through their app to reduce the amount of food that is thrown away without ever being eaten.

Olio’s volunteer operations manager, Emma Casablancas, said: “We are on a mission to help individuals and businesses share their surplus food amongst their community rather than throwing it away.

“As part of our Food Waste Hero Programme, we match volunteers to organisations and businesses, so that our volunteers can collect any surplus food at the sites and share them through our app.

“We have recently started collecting surplus food from defence sites across the country, and one of them is just outside Helensburgh.

“We currently already collect from Tesco stores, but we need to find more volunteers.”

The Tesco partnership sees Olio's volunteers - known as 'food waste heroes' - collect surplus food which is still fit for consumption from the company's supermarkets, and which isn't already being distributed to charities.

They then take the items home and list them on the Olio app, where fellow app users can request items and pick them up from the volunteers' homes.

Olio is now expanding on its Tesco partnership by establishing links with defence sites throughout the country.

The company launched in 2015 and over the past eight years has redistributed 96,000,000 portions of food from organisations and people registered with the app globally.

The app has around 90,000 volunteers - all of whom are food safety trained - throughout the UK and some seven million app users worldwide.

Anyone who is interested in getting involved or who has any questions about the initiative can email emma.casablancas@olioex.com.

To read more about the volunteer programme, visit www.olioapp.com/en/become-an-olio-volunteer.