Barcode revolution

by Charlie Peverett on 19.06.08

Ethical shopping goes mobile with Buy It Like You Mean It – a service that plans to “change the world, one purchase at a time”.

You’re in the supermarket. In front of you, a hundred different kinds of honey. Some are Fair Trade, some organic. A few are in the economy range, others would blow your year’s honey budget in one orgiastic, Winnie-the-Pooh moment. There are squeezy plastic bottles, and glass ones, maybe ones with free toys attached. Ones made in the UK, and ones made in Guatemala, Thailand and Tasmania. The choice is yours. And it’s mind-boggling.

Now consider another common shopping experience: shop online for a book and the choice is more staggering still, with hundreds of resellers and literally millions of titles on offer. But our decisions are, increasingly, guided by the experience of others. On Amazon, many of us will be influenced by the star rating, built up by dozens or even hundreds of others who have read the book in question, and by the often passionate reader reviews further down the page.

OK, so shopping for honey and shopping for books are different types of shopping, but what if you could access the combined wisdom of other shoppers while browsing the supermarket shelves? That’s one of the goals of Buy It Like You Mean It, a project based in Massachusetts that wants to make a global impact on our shopping habits.

The scheme (BILUMI for short) is building a database of reviews and user ratings that score the way that companies make and sell their products. They’ve started with chocolate – and have so far accumulated 160 reviews and twice the number of ratings.

By the end of the summer, they aim to have 200 reviews and 1,000 ratings – and then the clever bit kicks in. Once you’ve signed up to their service, you should be able to take a picture of a barcode on a chocolate bar or input the numbers into a text message, and send it to BILUMI, which will respond with an ‘ethical score’ for that company.

The score is designed to be responsive to your particular concerns. So if your bugbear is waste, you should see a rating that takes into account the company’s record on recycling. Products might also be rated on their maker’s employment practices, supply chains, treatment of animals and so on.

There’s more about how the project works in this ‘infomercial’.

The project’s president and founder is Clay Ward. We asked him more about his ambitions for the scheme – and how he plans to make sure it doesn’t fizzle out before it gets really useful.

Where are the chocolate ratings currently relevant?

Cocoa and chocolate are produced in many different countries and sold all over the place. So we are beginning a process with international implications. On the other hand, most socially responsible information services rely on staffers to input information. With limited time, they only review large multinational corporations. By creating an open system for user-generated content we’re opening the door to people reporting on the socially responsible impact of local businesses as well as multinationals. We hope that this will help the environmental, community, and socially responsible aspects of locally-based businesses be compared with those of larger industry.

How comprehensive and streamlined do you think the process of checking barcodes in-store will have to be before it’s practical for the average ethically-minded consumer?

Actually, I don’t imagine that people will use our service to check the socially responsible score of every product in their shopping cart. Instead I imagine people occasionally using our service to inform their brand loyalties when they have a question or a concern that they want answered. But even for casual use, it’s incredibly important to bring all of the information together using one system and to make the process easy to use. People simply don’t have the time to check a dozen different kinds of rating guides. So we hope to bring everything together in one convenient point of access.

By the end of the summer people will be able to use our service to send text messages with the bar code number of any chocolate product to our service. They’ll get back information about a wide variety of socially responsible interests. We think that that’s a good first step.

You have set targets of 200 reviews and 1,000 ratings for chocolate by the end of August. What are your targets for growth beyond that?

Yup. We’re starting with chocolate as our review focus. So our goal is to have 200 reviews and 1,000 ratings about chocolate by August so that we can have a solid body of knowledge to offer before we move to our next focus.

Your readers can go to our website and add their own perspective to help us achieve our goal! They can also vote on what we should research next.

There have been some promising web-based power-to-the-consumer ideas over recent years that haven’t taken off. How are you going to make sure BILUMI isn’t one of them?

We’ve learned from some of the hard lessons of other similar services.

-We are doing more than building a technological solution to this

problem: adopting this idea will be as much about person to person organizing as technology.

-We’re a non-profit, volunteer-based organization. The enthusiasm and support that we’ve received is overwhelming. The only substantial funding we’ve received has been from individual contributors. So we run a tight ship and have shown how much we can accomplish with so little. In short, we’re a very low risk venture. Once we’ve secured substantial funding we’ll be able to bring this project into mainstream usage. But even then we don’t want to rely on foundation support for too long. We’re investigating half a dozen potential funding streams so that we will be self sufficient in the long run.

-We’re open source and open content. That’s more than just a way to attract talented developers to help us (but please do help us!). It also means that even if we get sued by some litigious corporation and are forced to dissolve, our technology and data will still be available for the next organization to pick up where we left off!

-We have created a model that reflects the actual structure of the corporate supply chain. Too many responsible shopping tools rely on a model of convenience that doesn’t really give companies the chance to demonstrate and be rewarded for incremental change.

-We’re open to collaboration in a very real way. We’re already providing our technology to the MIT Media Lab’s Computing Culture Group so that they can build a service to help ranchers communicate about the effects of gas fracture mining in Colorado.

-We’re not going anywhere. We are determined to stick with this project and to update its technology in response to the concerns of our users.

Anyone trying this elsewhere in the world?

I have a spreadsheet of 60 different similar projects that have come and gone, are in use, or are just being developed. No one else is aspiring to giving users the ability to access customized information about a product’s supply chain in just a couple of seconds. So I think that we’re ahead of the curve. But I hope that we can partner with as many similar services as possible since sharing information is the name of the game.

If someone wanted to do this in the UK, could they use the technology you’ve developed?

Absolutely, our license will allow them to use our technology so long as their improvements are also freely available. We’ve already offered our services to ethiscore.org to give their readers the ability to add to the content provided by their professional research staff. So perhaps you’ll hear more about that soon.

But there’s no need to reinvent the wheel: there are already UK based chocolate companies that need reviewing and rating on our current site! Your readers can go online right now and add their own perspective by rating reviews of those companies or using our research guide to add their own reviews.

If Google said they’d like to take on the idea tomorrow and roll it out on a global scale, would you think ‘Job done!’?

No way. There’s too much at stake to assume that a for-profit organization (no matter how helpful and powerful) could get this right on their own. But we’d be really happy to get that phone call and would work with them certainly.

http://www.BuyItLikeYouMeanIt.org

IMAGES by Flickr users Chiara Marra and jim snapper