Good Guide: "Open Source" Product Information

Do you know what organic food products, green electricity, good weave rugs, and healthy stuff toys have in common? All of these products possess so-called "credence qualities", which are difficult to verify. Unlike the price or the design of products we as consumers cannot check these kinds of qualities – neither before nor after the purchase. Generally, we do not know:

• how organic food is produced and processed;
• what the sources of green electricity are;
• whether the weaving of rugs involves child labour; and
• what kind of chemicals are included in everyday products.

In these instances we have to rely on information provided by producers or independent third parties. Since many social and ecological product qualities are credence qualities, transparency is essential. "Good guide" is a social enterprise which seeks to provide reliable, instant and easy to use information on the health, environmental and social impacts of products. It all started a few years ago, when Dara O’Rourke put sunscreen on his five-year old daughter Minju before she went outside to play in the summer sun. The thought occurred to him: "What’s really in this stuff?" So, being a Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, Dara researched the sunscreen. What he found was surprising and disturbing: the sunscreen he’d been putting on Minju for years had toxic ingredients. That was a daunting moment, when Dara realized how little we know about the products we bring into our homes every day. He decided to do something about it and provide product information as an "open source". He brought both academic and technology experts together to develop a "For Benefit" start-up at the forefront of integrating science and technology. The (preliminary) result is the (beta version of) "Good Guide", which seeks to provide consumers with credible information regarding impacts of food and non-food products. On health. On the natural environment. On society. The certified "B" company wants to deliver this kind of information whenever and wherever consumers need it. They provide it on the web and via a new iPhone app, which allows consumers to scan the barcode of products and obtain health, environmental, and social ratings for a great variety of products.



The small Good Guide team scored approximately 100,000 products with data from nearly 200 sources, including government databases, studies by nonprofits and academics, and their own research. This is a great endeavour and visionary idea, which might change the marketplace in the future. In a New York Times article Dara O’Rourke is quoted saying: "What we’re trying to do is flip the whole marketing world on its head. Instead of companies telling you what to believe, customers are making the statements to the marketers about what they care about."
Until then, it is still a long way. Obviously, the scanning of the bar codes with the iPhone app does not function outside North America. We scanned a number of leading brand products in our households in Canada, Germany and Great Britain, but it does not seem to work there (yet). In addition, the scoring model of the three dimensions is not (fully) transparent and the scores tend to be somewhere in the middle, making it difficult for consumers to compare and decide between two or more product alternatives. To fill these gaps, increase the transparency, and to win over a critical mass of consumers we would like to suggest opening up the process of information gathering and assessing. Why not use the "wisdom of crowds" and involve a large number of consumer organizations and consumers from all over the world to gather information, discuss sustainability issues related to products, and have regular votes on the health, environmental, and social dimensions?