ACT Collaborative Marketplace for Sustainable Shopping: From Concept to Market

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

The food we buy contributes to almost one-third of the world's carbon footprint. Shoppers today want more control over what they buy and how they buy it. But with poor product transparency and an almost impossible problem of optimizing shopping for location, price, brand and sustainability, consumers end up as blind shoppers. With a growing number of organic, environmentally- and socially-conscious shoppers worldwide and online purchasing habits on the rise, we’ve created potentially the most hands-on solution, and it begins with grocery stores empowering shoppers to take action. ACT has spent 3 years developing an app and a global scalable rating system, which will make it easy for shoppers to buy sustainable groceries while boosting retailers’ competitive edge. ACT's mobile app and in-store software platform simplifies and personalizes the shopping process from start to finish. Features include a real-time market overview, shopping list optimization, in-store navigation, and a rating system which provides product transparency on the environmental and social footprint of over 30,000 products. The solution will give consumers the ability to make comparisons of; Price, Sustainability, Brand and Distance on their shopping lists together with mobile payments, self scanning and easy check-out. Our research shows that the company has a huge potential for both generating social and environmental returns as well as traditional profit. The company has carried out online surveys of their target segment indicating a large interest for the product. A Kickstarter campaign run by the company got funded Nov 2017 with 3.6% out of total visitors backing the project. The company wishes to raise up funds to secure next phase, which is testing of the prototype together with a limited numer of retail shops. Several retail chains have expressed interest in participating in testing the application in own physical as well as online stores.