Evocco: Food Climate Impact Tracker

Evocco addresses SDG's 12.6 and 12.8.

Consumers are increasingly aware of their need to behave more sustainably  however, they feel powerless and helpless when it comes to climate change. Coincidently, the ethical food market has grown 400% in 20 years, and since COVID-19 the sale of plant based meat has grown 264%. Sustainability is the new context in the food industry. To thrive, food brands need to understand these rapidly changing consumer attitudes.

Our mobile app empowers consumers to track, improve, and offset the climate impact of their food purchases. Evocco leverages the purchase and attitudinal data from the app to provide shopper insights to food brands that allows them to predict and act on future sustainability trends.

By helping 5M consumers make dietary changes and offsetting the difficult changes, by 2025, we can reduce their personal climate impact from food by 50%. This would reduce global CO2e by 5.3M tonnes annually.

Consumers are increasingly aware of their need to lead a more sustainable lifestyle. 83% of EU citizens have indicated that they are willing to spend more to lead a more sustainable lifestyle. However, they feel powerless and helpless when it comes to climate change. 60% of UK citizens are confused on what food products count as sustainable. 

These changing attitudes towards sustainability are now affecting the revenues for food companies. The ethical food market has grown 400% in the last 20 years, and since COVID-19 the sale of plant based meat has grown 264%. Sustainability is the new context for the food industry, and now a fundamental business requirement. To thrive in this new context, food companies need to understand these changing consumer preferences and make sustainability a strong revenue driver in their business.

By speaking to food companies, we've learnt that they need to gain a deeper "understanding of what drives consumer motivations and behaviours" and "how to bring their sustainability narrative to life for each of their products"  to  "be able to pick out what will be a consumer trend in the next two years an  also address the changes to come in the next 10 years."

Technologies: Evocco is an AI first company and uses; Computer Vision, Recommender System, Natural Language Processing, Clustering Techniques, Predictive Analytic Techniques

Mobile App
Evocco empowers consumers to take control of their climate impact. 

Users photograph their food shopping receipt and get an instant combined climate impact and nutrition score for their purchases. They can track their progress over time and see how they compare to other users and their peers. 

Users get personalised tips based on their shopping to help them improve their climate impact score every time they shop.  

Users can make a positive impact every time they shop by using the offset feature to plant native woodland and make their shop carbon neutral.

Data Insights Interactive Dashboard
Evocco helps food brands understand the motivations driving the changing attitudes and purchasing behaviours of conscious consumers and how best to turn sustainability into a revenue driver.

Evocco shows food brands which types of consumers are interested in their products and why. Evocco helps food brands identify which channels are best to access these users. 

Evocco measures the monetary value that they put on sustainability and helps brands predict the ROI for improving the sustainability of their portfolio.

We are targeting climate conscious consumers with the spending power to act on their intentions. These tend to be millennials aged between 25 and 40. They are well educated professionals, middle class and have the need to align their personal values with every aspect of their life. They have a constant need to self improve and often do so through quantified self approaches, and want their achievements and actions to be validated socially. 

Our solution addresses their needs by allowing them to take control of their climate impact. Progressive learning models motivate them to make long-term green behaviour change. Offsetting their emissions through the app, empowers them to take direct climate action. 

We initially  focus on english speaking markets where the cultural context in which food is bought is similar. This is predominantly a supermarket context where 91% of sales consist of one big shopping trip a week and half of these trips supplemented by smaller trips throughout the week. Our first market of the UK & Ireland has roughly 1.8M of these consumers.

We have adopted a co-design approach by adding people systematically to our private beta (>300 users) to understand how best to improve and address their needs. 

Evocco's target audience are driving the green consumer movement. They are more motivated than ever to shift towards low-impact, diverse and nutritious diets. This can be seen by the 62% increase in veganism in the last year in the UK. Evocco provides them with the tools required to facilitate this transition to a healthy diet within planetary boundaries. 

Through Evocco's revenue model of selling data insights to food brands, Evocco also addresses the sub-challenge of scaling new business models for producer-market connections. By equipping the food brand with high resolution consumer data, we can make new sustainable business models viable. 

Innovation:

1. Climate impact tracking is a more powerful behavioural change tool than just providing consumers with information on their climate impact. Evocco uses behavioural economics techniques such as real-time feedback, personalisation, social influence theory, and progressive learning to help the consumer make long term meaningful behavioural change.
   
2. Frictionless data collection is essential for a smooth user experience and gathering data for insights. Evocco uses its own data capture algorithm to accurately capture relevant information from uploaded receipts. This gives the user a score for their entire shopping with one t, and high quality data insights in a short turnaround. 
   
3. Emissions reduction is voluntary for most industries, leading to a lack of urgency. Evocco both increases the value consumers place on sustainability and shows food businesses how the market is changing and how they can make money by being more sustainable. This can greatly accelerate climate action in the industry.

Competitors:

B2C:
Sustainability Lifestyle Apps: Giki Badges, Almond, Joulebug 
Product Eco-Labelling: Rainforest Alliance 
Consumer Practical Solutions: Own research 

USP: Consumers can easily track, improve and offset the impact of their food purchasing all with one tool. 

B2B:
Consumer Data Science Companies: Nielsen (€5.7Bn revenue), Dunnhumby (€388M) 
Traditional Panel Providers/ Market Research: Kantar (€3.5Bn)
Modern App Based Panel Providers:Numerator (€133M)

USP: We provide unique insights on the conscious consumer group. The compelling valuation proposition of the Evocco app for these consumers results in high engagement and the ability to match individual purchasing behaviour to consumer attitudes . 

Data Capture System: Receipts
This is built using OCR technology from the Google Cloud Platform and our own data capture algorithm to match food products recognised with climate impact scores in our database. The quality of input from the OCR is consistently high, and our data capture algorithm is designed such that the more receipts uploaded the higher the accuracy we can achieve from it. 

Data Capture System: Direct Retailer POS Integration
There are two main parts to this product, receiving purchase data from retailer systems and returning climate impact scores, and matching the information received to a shopper’s Evocco account if they have one. Both of these parts primarily rely on APIs and webhooks. Integrations with POS systems using these technologies are common. The biggest product concern for retail customers is the security of data transfer, and this has played a primary role in design. No sensitive customer data is transferred, with Evocco only requesting the last four digits of the customer payment card number. This is made possible by PSD2 banking regulations and companies like Plaid and Fidel providing easy integrations for third parties like Evocco. If a user links their payment card to Evocco and accepts the appropriate terms and conditions, then Evocco can compare and match the transaction on a user’s account to transactions in store. If timestamps, total spend, and the last four digits of a user’s payment card match then the purchases can be assigned to that user without difficulty. 

Our last data insights sample report which was showcased to food brands based on live app data: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R1d1OfQcu0BeaGZ_X-SIrzkPzy6PlVSu/view?usp=sharing

Our mobile app is currently in beta which you can sign-up for using the code: EVOCCO2020 at https://app.evocco.com

The Direct POS Integration has already been demonstrated by digital receipt companies like Flux.

We believe business can have a positive impact on society and still be profitable. We want to create a world in which climate impact is a key consideration in all food purchases. To make this viable we must enable the food industry to couple its profits with its sustainability efforts.

Activity: User scans their food shopping receipt every-time they shop
Output: User receives a score based on the nutrition and climate impact of their purchases. User also receives a tip to improve their score.
Short-term Outcome: User learns more about sustainability and is more conscious about their purchases. 
Long-term Outcome: User begins to change their behaviour and make low-carbon dietary choices

2. Consumer App - Climate Action

Activity: User offsets their emissions directly through the app 
Output: User sees how taking climate action can be easy and and their purchases are now carbon neutral. They can see their personal forest beginning to grow within the app
Short-term Outcome: User feels a part of the climate journey and sees how small changes can make a difference
Long-term Outcome: User begins to put a monetary value on sustainability and develops a closer connection to the natural world

3. Data Insights Dashboard

Activity: Food brand uses Evocco's Data Insights
Output: Food receives actionable insights to improve sustainability of portfolio and increase revenue. Food brand implements these changes and overtime greatly reduces the carbon footprint of it's portfolio. 
Short-term Outcome: Food brand use this data for marketing and increases sales to conscious consumers.
Long-term Outcome: Food businesses understand that sustainability is a key revenue driver in the industry.

Currently: 304 

Next Year: 15,000

5 years: 5,000,000

Consumer Impact: By making small dietary changes such as reducing red meat consumption, a person can reduce their personal food impact by 29% with larger changes such as moving towards a fully plant-based diet can reduce their impact by up to 70%. Assisting 5 million people to make small dietary changes by 2025 would reduce global emissions by 3.2M tonnes annually. Through offsetting difficult changes, we can reduce their climate impact by a further 20%. Helping us reduce their total climate impact from food by 50% and reducing global CO2 by 5.3M tonnes annually. 

Food Industry Impact: Evocco makes sustainable innovation viable and competitively advantageous for food brands by coupling their sustainability ambitions with financial targets. In industries such as coffee and beef, it is possible to reduce emissions by 1000%21. We track our influence by measuring the reduction in climate impact of the average basket bought by consumers in our retail partner stores. We intend to empower our customers to achieve a 50% reduction in the climate impact of the average basket bought by 2025. 

Next Year:

Financial Barriers: Evocco needs the time and resources to build a captive user audience in order to achieve both it's revenue and impact ambitions. 

Market Barriers: Evocco needs a retailer to pilot its direct POS integration in order to prove the model for other retailers. 

Five Years Time:

Food Impact Data: Evocco needs to ensure it's climate impact data remains up to date and increases in accuracy as time goes on. 

Next Year:

Financial Barriers: 360 Labs invested €50k on a convertible loan note to Evocco in January. The second tranche is to arrive later this year and they will be part of our seed round and can invest up to €1M. Enterprise Ireland is an investor in Evocco.  Evocco is likely to be in line to avail of €250,000 in matched funding from the Irish State. Enterprise Ireland is limited to holding a 10% stake of companies that they support, and have already reached this limit for Evocco.

Market Barriers: The Umdasch Group the Store Makers provide an end to end solution for shop fitting to retailers in Europe. We won their Umdasch Research Prize in March and secured a letter of intent. We are currently negotiating what the official partnership will look like. We intend to sell to retailers through their channels.

Five Years Time:

Food Impact Data: Eaternity is a life cycle assessment data company that specialises in calculating the various environmental impacts and health effects of food. We license our food data from Eaternity. 

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Employees: 

Full-time: 2

Part-time (70%): 1

Contractors:

Full-time: 2

Ahmad and Hugh, the co-founders of Evocco are both mechanical engineers by training, and it didn’t take long for them to recognise that climate breakdown is going to bring a change to our society at a scale and speed that we’ve never witnessed before. As soon as they graduated they embarked on this journey and dedicated their careers to achieving their goal of empowering consumers to lead a more sustainable lifestyle.

Over the last three years they have upskilled, navigated the harsh realities of startup life with little resources, overcome business challenges, and established themselves as thought leaders in the food sustainability space. Evocco was awarded the UN Environment Young Champion of the Earth award for Europe in 2018. This seal of approval from the world’s most important environmental agency sets Evocco apart from other players trying to enter this space.

Their profile has provided us access to senior management and executives at market leaders such as Unilever, Nestlé and Danone and allowed them to build a strong team around them. The Evocco team has strong technical backgrounds and are well positioned as thought leaders in food sustainability. They are young, passionate and resilient. To compensate for their limited marketing and commercial experience, Evocco work with a strong team of advisors. Longer-term Evocco intends to bring these competencies into the core team. To begin with Evocco intends to hire a strong commercial expert with marketing experience on to the core team later in the year.

Eaternity AG: Eaternity is a life cycle assessment data company that specialises in calculating the various environmental impacts and health effects of food. We license our food data from Eaternity.

Forestry Partners: We’ve chosen an Irish not for profit Forestry Partners as our primary carbon offset partner for the app. Future collaborations will include planning events for users and communities. Our cost per tonne of CO2 to offset with them is €181 on a 30 year time horizon.

Unilever Foundry: The Unilever Foundry helps startups deliver their solutions to the brands owned by Unilever. We have been working with them in an unofficial capacity predominantly through knowledge sharing and codesign on the type of insights Evocco intends to deliver. We codesigned a brand brochure to sell our services to their brands with the intention of securing a pilot at the end of Q2 2020. We intend to secure an official partnership in the coming months.

Umdasch Group the Store Makers:  The Umdasch Group the Store Makers provide an end to end solution for shop fitting to retailers in Europe. We intend to sell our POS integration through their channels. We won their Umdasch Research Prize in March and secured a letter of intent. We are currently negotiating what the official partnership will look like.

Evocco offers the app as a free service to consumers where they can make in-app purchases such as offsetting their emissions. Planting of trees through the Evocco app to offset emissions of food purchases costs the user €0.21 per 1kg of CO2e.

Our primary revenue stream is the sale of consumer insights to the subsidiaries of large food conglomerates on a B2B Enterprise SaaS model through our interactive dashboard. Access to the dashboard is sold on a three year contract on a monthly subscription. We have three tiers which are outlined below: 

1. Access to static data reports and general market insights 3000p/m;
2.  Access to general market insights and category specific insights of choice. Dynamic Data to create custom reports. €4500 p/m;
3. Access to general market insights and all category specific insights. Dynamic data to create custom reports €6000 p/m

Our secondary revenue stream is the sale of our POS integration software to retailers on a SaaS subscription model to improve consumer loyalty by providing a digital sustainability experience. This is sold on a 3 year contract on a per store basis. Retailers can avail of two tiers here;

1. Climate impact data printed on receipts and basic insights on consumers using Evocco app €330 per month per store.
2. SDK to provide Evocco experience directly to retailer web and native apps €1700 pm per store

We are applying to MIT Solves to help us overcome both our financial barriers and our market barriers. 

Financial Barriers: The direct funding available will allow us to increase our runway to hit our traction goals and comfortably raise our seed round by January 2021. Access to talent from the MIT Solves network could help offset our main costs such as software development and data science through the University and marketing expertise through the network. 

Market Barriers: The MIT network is a prestigious network that could help us gain access to potential retailers and food brand customers. Working with the business expertise in the network will also ensure that we are refining our proposition and operating on the most impactful and efficient business model as possible. 

Our goals for the partnership are to get support in achieving our year end  business targets: 

Secure 5000 MAU

Complete a pilot with a retailer

Secure term-sheets and begin legals for the seed round

Sell our first data insights report

We would love to collaborate with the following MIT Faculties:

School of Data, Systems and Society to enable us to improve our offering to both users and food companies by working with the top data science minds. Challenges include creating a compelling habit building experience for the user to accelerate the transition to more green behaviours and helping food companies in translating these attitudes and behaviours into actionable insights to help them improve their businesses in a sustainable way. 

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science would enable us to get some more software development help to improve our capacity and speed up our development cycles. 

We would also like to partner food brands and retailers to pilot our B2B products and ensure we can deliver an impactful revenue driving solution to them.

Our mission is to create a world in which climate impact is a key consideration in all food purchases. To make this viable we must enable the food industry to couple its profits with its sustainability efforts. To achieve this we have been developing a a suite of digital tools and have adopted the Google approach of being an AI first company. AI plays a pivotal role in all our products; we use computer vision, natural language processing, clustering techniques, a recommender system, and predictive tools to deliver products which are highly impactful to both consumers and industry. 

Receiving this prize would enable us to invest it into building our POS integration system which would allow us to automatically update a user's climate impact score without receipt scanning which would open up our service to more users, integrate directly to food retailers to print climate impact scores on receipts and improve the experience provided through their consumer facing channels, and improve the reliability, consistency and quality of the data insights we sell to food brands.

Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time and affects each and everyone of us on the planet. The food industry, although an essential service to all, accounts for a significant percentage of emissions (26%). We exist to accelerate the food industry's green transition to within planetary boundaries. Our approach involves using AI and digital tools to empower consumers to take direct climate action through the food that they eat, and food companies to make sustainability a key revenue driver in their businesses. 

Receiving this prize would enable us to invest it into building our POS integration system which would allow us to automatically update a user's climate impact score without receipt scanning which would open up our service to more users, integrate directly to food retailers to print climate impact scores on receipts and improve the experience provided through their consumer facing channels, and improve the reliability, consistency and quality of the data insights we sell to food brands.