After I posted yesterday on Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's push for using scannable codes to provide consumers with information on food ingredients from genetically modified crops, Ben Grossman-Cohen of the anti-poverty group Oxfam International sent a reaction that merits publication as a "Your Dot" contribution.
In my piece, I wrote about the prospect that scannable codes can lead to far more background on products than simply the role of biotechnology in their production. I mentioned one of my favorite examples — the prospect of charting the origin of the tropical mangoes in a popular Belgian juice line. Grossman-Cohen discusses some noteworthy examples of online information portals, including one created by Oxfam, that can help inform consumers:
Secretary Vilsack is probably right to suggest that the future of labeling and transparency for food products is in some form of a bar code scanner. There are actually a number of groups like OpenLabel, GoodGuide and Buycott that are already exploring the world of apps that allow consumers to scan bar codes to find out what's in/behind the labels of the products they buy. Ultimately somebody will figure out how to do it really well. The main challenge seems to be figuring out how much information to include and then actually making the tools useful and user friendly.
You mentioned your son's taste for Looza and wondered, "Where does the pulp come from? Are there good labor standards, sustainable farming practices?" Like most brands Looza is actually owned by one of of the giant food companies. These days, it's difficult to find products on our shelves that aren't. In this case I believe Looza is a Tropicana product and thus a subsidiary of PepsiCo. [He's right.]
A great existing resource to know whether PepsiCo/Tropicana are operating sustainably is Oxfam's interactive Behind the Brands rankings, which rate companies for how sustainable and responsible their corporate policies are. Looking at Tropicana's scores you'll see that our assessment of PepsiCo found that their policies on farmers and workers issues are "poor" while they get slightly higher marks for how they address their impacts on climate change and land. If you really want to dig into the details you can read through our massive open data sheet that shows how those scores were created.
It's not a perfect tool, but certainly gives a good overview of some of the key issues related to how the companies that own the brands we buy are operating. We are also exploring how to bring our data to consumers everywhere via a bar code scanner. In fact, the data behind our scorecard is already being used by a group called eLabel in their bar code scanning app for Woolworths customers in South Africa. Hopefully consumers everywhere will have that opportunity someday soon.
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