We wanna know better what are all the products we buy made of and by whom. This is our mission underlying the Uutiskoodi -phone application that lists news based on product barcodes.
Let us illustrate what Uutiskoodi is about with the help of chocolate Easter eggs. We did a small Uutiskoodi news search over Kinder Surprise.
First we learned that Kinder Suprise is produced by an Italian family owned company Ferrero, which has a reputation of being excessively secretive, and that tragically the second chief executive of the company, Pietro Ferrero, died right before Easter in South-Africa.
The main ingredients of the chocolate eggs are milk powder, cocoa butter, sugar and cocoa mass. Most of the world cocoa is produced in the Ivory Cost and Ghana (55%). The cocoa production has an extremely bad reputation for using child labor or even child slavery. Ferrero has shown no commitments to shift to fair trade production.
Looking at the environmental impact of Kinder; the life cycle impact (in terms of CO2 emissions) of milk chocolate and white chocolate is higher than that of plain dark chocolate. This is due to the use of milk powder in the chocolate mix.
Yet, Kinder Suprise is more than the tasty chocolate. The chocolate is wrapped in metal which in Finland should be recycled with the other small metals (e.g. cans). Inside we find the surprise (usually a plastic toy) that is manufactured by a company called MPG (which stands for Magic Production Group), but almost no news whatsoever can be found on the toys. Dodgy! We hope no news means good news. Yet, we did find out, that because the toy content Kinder eggs are banned in The US.
We would like to see customers turning into little experts of their favorite products, knowing the backgrounds and, also, becoming more demanding, pointing out the specific reasons of discontent. Uutiskoodi might result that one will not do the shopping as quickly as before! Suddenly the quick trips to the local super market might turn into a news reading session. However, spending lot of time in markets and stores is in the end nothing new. Already customers are guided through markets in such a way that no matter how quick you want to do your shopping you always end up spending more time you intended. Everybody knows how is it to visit IKEA, and still we seem to have time for it! So we suggest is time for news.
For further information please visit: @Uutiskoodi and www.lescousines.fi/p/uutiskoodi.html
