Fork Ranger

You’ve probably heard that eating meat causes climate change. But do you know why? And isn’t soy even worse?

Our food is one of the most destructive forces on the planet and is responsible for a quarter of all emissions. Yet hardly any of us understand what sustainable food really is. Even if we did, changing habits is hard.

That’s why we started Fork Ranger: a game to make sustainable cooking radically easy. By completing quests about the food system, you unlock sustainable recipes that have been crafted for the struggles of daily life. Basically, we help you answer two tricky questions: 1. What can I do about climate change? And 2. What’s for dinner?

Eating is like voting three times a day for what kind of world we want to live in. With Fork Ranger, millions of people will be empowered to ‘vote’ for a more sustainable world.

Worldwide, people are generally willing to eat less meat for environmental reasons (China 42%, The Netherlands 40%, Canada 50%). But in those same countries, food emissions are still rising. This problem has three dimensions:

1. Knowledge
More people know about the high impact of meat but this isn't enough to reduce their emissions. For example, replacing meat with dairy products can sometimes increase one's ecological footprint. While lots of information is available, much of it feels contradictory and it can be hard to see the bigger picture. 'Is grass-fed beef better than almonds from California?' People become overwhelmed and return to what they already know.

2. Habits
Even if someone understands the problem and wants to change, actually doing so is a whole new challenge. Since food is emotional and habit-based, changing one's diet is a complex journey. I've experienced this myself: It took me years to move from caring about my food emissions to eating sustainably.

3. Feelings
Meat is an emotional topic. Sometimes people are afraid to change because they don't like who they will become. Vegetarian or vegan are strong markers of identity that many people don't want to be associated with.

The Fork Ranger App takes you on a journey to learn about the food system and step by step change your diet by cooking sustainable recipes.

1. Journey (knowledge)
The journey consists of small quests. By scrolling through easy information, playing games and answering quizzes, you learn about the problems and possible solutions. Every quest you finish gives you experience points (XP). The quests are ordered in relation to their impact. For example, you start by learning why it's important to avoid beef because it has the largest footprint.

2. Recipes (habits)
Your XP will unlock easy, sustainable recipes. They only include the most familiar ingredients and are designed to be nutritionally complete, yet affordable and easy to prepare. Everything from ingredients to the layout is designed according to behavioral psychology principles about changing habits as well as the most recent science about sustainable diets.

3. Storytelling (emotion)
As you continue your journey, your goal is to become a Fork Ranger. This changes the narrative from something negative (you cannot eat meat) to a more positive vision (take care of your environment and make meat a luxury for the weekend).

Linda is 29 years old and lives in Amsterdam. She recycles, buys fewer clothes and tries to eat more sustainable. She really likes the vegetarian recipes from Ottolenghi but finds them too difficult for most days. Every time she watches a climate change documentary, she feels fired up to be more active but she doesn’t know where to start. The next day she falls back into her daily routine, carrying around a deep-buried feeling of uneasiness about the future of the world and her role in it. 

With Fork Ranger, Linda gets new energy. Understanding the importance of food within climate change allows her to relax about not living perfectly sustainable in all areas of life. She loves to explore new flavors and none of the recipes overwhelm her. She feels good about herself and her friends are intrigued by her enthusiasm. Even her meat-loving boyfriend is curious. With the right information, easy recipes and a good laugh, Linda slowly convinces people around her to eat less meat as well. Not only can she finally relax about her footprint, she feels a new sense of purpose to continue her adventure of making the world a better place.

We cannot avoid a climate disaster without eating less meat. The Drawdown report lists a plant-rich diet as the third most effective solution for climate change. 

When asked, many people worry about climate change and are theoretically willing to reduce their meat consumption. But they don’t know where to start and struggle to change their habits.

Fork Ranger provides the necessary information and then bridges the gap between intention and action. Our app reduces one of people’s highest emission categories (meat consumption) while giving them a sense of relief that they are part of the solution for climate change.

Fork Ranger makes it radically easier and more desirable to practice a sustainable diet. No other solution educates people’s understanding of sustainable food in an enjoyable way while also helping them to turn it into action.

People might use an emission tracker to learn about their footprint and read books on climate change and agriculture. They might download a recipe app or search for vegan recipes on blogs. But we have already done all of this for them and upgraded the experience.

While there is an overlap between veganism and sustainable food systems, there are also many differences. Fork Ranger is the only solution we know of that connects the latest science on sustainable agriculture to people’s everyday food choices.

Our innovation centers on design. Just like Tinder simplified the dating process into swiping right or left (for better or worse), Fork Ranger simplifies climate-friendly cooking.

We have connected something abstract like climate change to the daily 'problem' of making dinner. We help people with the dinner question by improving on recipe design, with both ingredients as well as visual layout. While most recipes are made from a chef’s perspective, we start with the home cook in mind. Serving home cooks is important because as Foodnavigator reports, one of the most popular resolutions for the US is “spending more time at home cooking healthy dishes.”

Most importantly, we have 'translated' a depressing topic like climate change into the adventure of becoming a Fork Ranger.

Fork Ranger relies on software development. As a purely digital product, Fork Ranger can easily scale and spread around the globe. The potential of digital apps has been exploited by companies like Facebook but also offers a powerful advantage to companies fighting climate change: an increase of users doesn’t result in an increase in raw materials but only more server space. This is an important benefit over manufacturing because it allows us to maximize our impact while minimizing our own footprint.

At the moment, Fork Ranger exists as a progressive web-app (PWA). This means it functions on any device with a browser and can also be added to someone’s phone home screen. 

At the time of writing, the app is live since 8 days and 73 people have registered. They complete quests and spend between 5-20 minutes on their first exploration of the app.

We have received lots of excited reactions and almost exclusively 5 star reviews for the recipes.

Video of how it works 

Activity: The Fork Ranger app
Fork Ranger translates climate science into vegetarian recipes, educational content and inspiring stories about becoming a Fork Ranger.

Output: More knowledge and sustainable meals
When someone engages with the app, there are two possible outcomes:
1. People gain knowledge about the topic of climate change and food
2. People cook one of the recipes

Short-term outcome: More confident climate cooks
Cooking the recipes is likely to result in a reduced environmental footprint (30-80%).

Both the knowledge and cooking the recipes makes someone a more confident Fork Ranger, i.e. someone who eats more sustainable. 
Using a recipe to cook a sustainable meal gives people something to be proud of. Not only have they made a good meal for themselves and maybe their family, they have also contributed to a climate solution. Since the recipes are designed to be as easy as possible, it gives people more confidence that they can cook without meat.
More knowledge and content reinforces their feeling that they're on a good path and motivates to keep going.

Long-term outcome: More purposeful citizens
Research has shown that one's opinion and attitude are often a result of past actions. We like to think we decide on our values, but often we shape our desires through our habits. 

The process of cooking sustainable meals embodies a different worldview than that of being a consumer. Consumerism starts with the gratification of your own desires, while sustainable cooking starts from a perspective outside yourself. In other words, taking the time and attention to cook sustainably means practicing the values of a more selfless and empathetic world. 

Since food is something we engage with everyday, becoming a Fork Ranger is likely to create a chain reaction in other parts of life. And that is our long-term mission: to build the foundations for reshaping what 'The Good Life' means. Because only when we abandon consumerism for a better narrative can we truly regenerate the planet and live happier lives.

Now: ca. 1500
Fork Ranger started with a book that includes information and recipes. It came out in December 2019 and 1100 copies have been sold so far.
Our newsletter and social media following is a combined 1000 people. A bit less than half of those people can be counted as being directly affected (around 400).
At the time of writing, the first version of the app has been live for 8 days and currently has 73 users. 

One year: ca. 9.000
The feedback from the book and app so far have validated people’s excitement. We project that it will be possible to grow the users of our app exponentially with 50% per month.

Five years: ca. 10 million
In the highest meat consumption regions (Europe, North and South America and China) there are around 263 million people who identify as flexitarian. Using this as estimate for how many people can be excited about Fork Ranger, we feel confident it will be possible to reach 3-4% of those people with our app.

In the next 12 months, we want to test and expand the current version of the Fork Ranger app. The current version was built by myself without any programming experience. Thus the first step will be stabilizing the app with the help of a developer. With the feedback and tests we already have, we are convinced that the concept will work but the details are a matter of execution and testing. In the first six months, we will test the features and then focus on growing our user base. 

The goal for the next five years is reaching at least 10 million users. With our recipes and information, people can reduce their food-related emissions by 30-80%. If half of the users cook regularly and taking the 30% measure, it would save 2,7 million tons of CO2 per year. This is equivalent to running 583 wind turbines for a year, which might cost around $1,5 billion to install. 

We also have dreams for the next ten years. Besides further growing our user base, we also want to expand into education and infotainment. With a strong Fork Ranger brand, we will have a chance to broaden our impact through cultural life. This could include collaborations with museums and schools and producing short films and documentaries.

The two biggest barriers at the moment are a lack of finances and finding the right talent. So far, Fork Ranger has been running on my own savings which does not allow hiring any teammates. Without funding, it will be hard to attract great talent, but without more teammates it will also be hard to receive funding. The biggest hurdle to more impact right now is not having a developer.

Finances and especially talent will remain relevant barriers for the coming years since building a great app is all about having great people and the resources to hire them. Fork Ranger’s activity is about translating complex information into easy design, thus we need a great team of designers, developers, cooks and researchers. 

An additional long-term barrier is cultural nuances of food. At the start, it will be easy to find English-oriented early adopters but as we scale up it will require an adaptation of the recipes to local preferences.

We are currently in the process of bringing a developer on board. This is mostly a matter of networking.

The plan for solving the continuous talent barrier is creating a strong culture that people want to be a part of. Instead of superficial perks, Fork Ranger will offer a sense of belonging and purpose. Together we are not only tackling one of the world’s biggest problems but also redefining what ‘work’ means to us. A sustainable world is not a place where employees hardly go on vacation and are continuously stressed. The Amsterdam life of bicycles and having a good time symbolizes how we want to set ourselves apart from the madness of Silicon Valley.

We aim to solve the financial barriers by attracting subsidies, grants and investments from the Dutch government, angel investors, venture capital firms and foundations. We are confident that we have a solution that can generate a profit.

Not applicable

Full-time: 1

Frank Holleman, founder

Volunteers: 4

Diane Meijning, facilities and translation
Ploy Thirapongphaiboon, plant-based chef 
Tim Polaszek, regenerative agriculture advisor
Julia IJsselmuiden, sustainable food advisor

The number one reason that startups fail is because no one wants to buy their product. We feel confident about avoiding this trap because I am the target audience myself. I was so frustrated with vegetarian recipes that I decided to make a cookbook for friends and family. Again and again, people were excited about the concept and Fork Ranger grew from there.

The only way to change people is with stories, also when it comes to food. My personal story serves as the example and inspiration for the people who want to be part of the solution but don’t know how. It’s as if I’m talking to my past self.

Storytelling and design is at the core of Fork Ranger and also what comes most natural to me. Additionally, my two biggest strengths are radical optimism and teaching myself new skills. This is how I self-published the Fork Ranger book and developed the first version of the app.

The people who support me complement my weaknesses. Together we cover the necessary expertise to teach people about the food system and create the right recipes.

We are currently expanding the team, starting with a full-time developer.

Since the feedback of the book has shown that people are interested in the Fork Ranger approach, we are confident that success is now a matter of execution. And that is a journey we feel like we were born to do.

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At the core of Fork Ranger is the previously described app with educational quests and recipes. This will be available for free, which will allow a fast growth of new users. A fully functional free app is easily recommended in the app store and social gamification aspects like a leaderboard will encourage sharing. 

The value proposition for these free users is twofold: learning about a topic they worry about and cooking new recipes to feel peace of mind about their impact on the world. In a traditional business, free users only count as advocates but don't contribute to the bottom line. Our free users also contribute to our impact since they are cooking the recipes.

Additional to this free version, we will offer all of the above with a third value proposition: a sense of belonging. For €9,99 a month ($11,28), someone can join the Fork Ranger community. This allows them to earn badges, vote on new features, and interact with other members. Every week, they will also receive new recipes and cooking tips, as well as inspiration for an adventurous and sustainable life. This is about empowering people who want to live a full Fork Ranger life and making them leaders in their community.

Many food-related start-ups are focused on local or community projects. But Fork Ranger is more of a traditional tech-company with a focus on food and social impact. Therefore we are interested in Solve because of the overlap between technology and impact.

We are applying to Solve because we need to be engaged outside our Amsterdam bubble. Fork Ranger's approach requires a global and multidisciplinary approach in order to write educational quests that can be relevant globally. This is also true for developing recipes that will be able to deal with the local and cultural nuances of food.

Becoming a Solve member instantly broadens our network. This is crucial for our two biggest barriers:

1. Talent: to build a great app we need great developers. MIT is an invaluable partner to get introduced and to establish the credibility to attract talent.

2. Funding: to fund Fork Ranger we want to work with social impact investors. Again, becoming a Solve member can introduce us to more people and provides credibility.

Overall, we are interested in the Solve mindset: using tech to build solutions with the largest impact possible. Various other programmes we looked at were either not interested in tech or didn't use this rational approach to scaling impact. We set up Fork Ranger as a solution to one of the biggest problems in the world: shifting diets to more plant-based. We think Solve appreciates this ambition and we would love to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs.

Funding and revenue model:

Fundraising requires a strong business case and relevant data. Solve has the right experience to advise us in an approach that combines a strong financial case with impact. We've noticed that people can often help us with one or the other. Solve's network provides both.

Talent recruitment:

Building the right team is only possible with the right network. Solve's affiliation with MIT increases our chances to get in touch with technical talent. 

Marketing, media, and exposure:

As a Dutch company, we need some help with expanding into the US, which is a crucial target market given the high per capita meat consumption.

We would like to partner with the following faculties:

Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences for creating content. A central feature of Fork Ranger is translating the problem of food and agriculture into enjoyable learning quests. This requires expert knowledge.

Media Arts and Sciences to explore the best learning technologies and challenge us in our approach. Since our app is about educational quests, it would be exciting to partner with the people researching the future of learning.

We would like to partner with any other organisation or Solve member in the space of shifting consumer habits, storytelling and research about how sustainable agriculture relates to consumer choices. 

The premise of Fork Ranger is that everyone can help to solve climate change by starting with their own food. Our solution makes doing that as easy as possible. Since food is often the biggest emission category of people's lives (35% in the Netherlands), Fork Ranger will be the number one solution to start living more sustainably.

So from a numbers perspective, Fork Ranger is positioned to make the biggest impact possible.

But food is also connected to emotions and stories, so a solution to change people's diets should be emotional, too. We have designed Fork Ranger to live up to this challenge:

• An attractive brand that people want to associate with
• Using behavioural psychology to design experiences that can change people's habits
• Using recipes as ultimate tool to determine how we should fill our plates to cook sustainable meals
• An optimistic narrative to excite people about the future

Our app and business model have been purposefully designed to be scalable across various countries and reach millions of people. We are convinced that we have a strong plan to help millions of people eat more sustainably. Now we need the resources to execute.

With $200,000 we will be able to hire the necessary talent to build a powerful Fork Ranger app. As a designer I built the first prototype myself, but to be effective we need a team of the best developers. The reputation and financial support of Solve would put us in a position to deliver on our grand ambitions.