The EvoCCo Project, by Counting Carbon

Evocco is a web-based smart shopping assistant that empowers consumers to buy more eco-friendly food products. It gathers data about the environmental impact of food. The data collected through the system can be provided to food retailers and producers. The platform rates products according to factors such as greenhouse gas emissions, habitat loss, water usage, and deforestation. Evocco is your new eco-friend when it comes to helping you find the most nutritious food for the lowest environmental impact. When you go shopping, all you need to do is snap your receipt, build a basket, and track your progress over time to increasingly discover that it’s easier than ever to match your beliefs with what you buy. Evocco gives you all the tips and tricks you need to train your inner eco-warrior and embrace a more holistically sustainable lifestyle.

Long Description

Our Smart Shopping Assistant is designed to help people adopt a healthy, climate resilient diet. The product is targeted at the millennial generation, and the first version is a plug-in for existing e-commerce sites. The product educates shoppers about the connection between food and the climate, assisting them to transition to a resilient diet over time. Shoppers go through the normal online process, and are strategically prompted to buy more resilient products along the way. The shopping experience is gamified, and shoppers can track their progress against their peer group.

The user experience is designed with nudge psychology and progressive learning techniques to make the shopping experience easier, and motivate shoppers to continually reduce their impact. The schools of psychology in UCD and the University of Bern are assisting us with this process. A 1000 user study is set to launch in conjunction with UB later this month.

We are working with lifecycle assessment data scientists Quantis, and food sustainability experts Eaternity to gather data about what constitutes a healthy, climate resilient diet. This includes water usage, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and emissions associated with a food, as well as how the food ranks on the nutritional density per climate impact index, and against global burden of disease data.

With later versions of our product, we intend to launch an ethical cryptocurrency, and reward shoppers for switching to lower impact products. The reward can then be exchanged for goods or services with other environmentally friendly partner companies within the ecosystem.