NUDGE - Sustainable Consumption Tracker

Consumers don't have proper incentives to buy sustainably and lack direct information about the greater impact of their consumption habits. As a result, businesses that produce sustainable products cannot effectively convey their competitive edge to consumers and are disadvantaged. By automating the ability to track consumer purchasing through a web-browser extension, we can provide suggestions for similar sustainable products on our platform. It's like a one-stop channel for sustainable purchases that encompasses a loyalty program within it. Link your online purchases through our browser add-on or directly scan and upload your receipt. Each alternative product has associated points based on the impact savings for switching products; we reward accumulated points with tokens; each token unlocks a level of discounts for a consumer's favorite products/brands. Our value proposition is that businesses will gain insight into purchasing behaviors, tailoring their discounted offerings on our platform that more accurately align with their customers.

Consumers are not aware of how sustainable or healthy the goods they purchase are. They also have no direct incentives to purchase the more expensive sustainable goods besides 'doing good'. On the other side, responsible businesses and farmers face uphill struggles of higher costs without an easy way to effectively position their goods based on how sustainable they are. They are further disadvantaged because they face the same retail costs to shelf their products as other businesses that enjoy lower production costs due to their unsustainable business practices. These costs decrease their bottom line, and in turn, make operating less profitable and more difficult to scale and retain their quality.

One of the first rules of economics is that people react to incentives. If we accept the reality of how we function and make decisions, we can create new structures and business models around human behavior to achieve the global goals. Three types of self-interested incentives explain most human actions: economic, social/status, and moral/self-gratification. Each one is needed to reach optimal result. Without incentivizing, nothing can be solved until fear pushes people to act to solve the global problems we face. However, fear often arrives when it is too late.

Our solution tackles the issue by addressing the three key human psychological incentives. For an economic incentive, our users gain points for buying responsibly that lead to monetary rewards such as discounts or gift cards for the sustainable brands they love. The better you consume, the better tier of rewards you will be in. For a social incentive, the points our users gain rank against their friends, family, or entire community. Leadership boards and transparency will be a driver for better decisions. For the moral incentive, we promote positive choices towards the sustainable development goals and our users can showcase that they 'did the right thing'. Why post in on social media if it is just automated directly into your Nudge Profile.

We create a nudge for consumers to eat more sustainable and healthy by making it easy, fun, rewarding, and competitive. Most importantly, we believe that it is everyone's right to know what is on their plate so that they can improve their lifestyle.

Target population:

• Consumers: middle/high income populations
• Producers: fair-trade coffee, sustainable farmers gain advantage.
• Foodies, home-moms, millennials and gen z

Market research:

• Business Development: asking businesses (i.e.wholefoods, reformation) what business insights they want
• Surveys
• Focus groups
• Research from existing sources
• Asking university professors and tech professionals for tech validation

Engaging the target market:

• Writing articles
• Content creation with cool videos explaining alternative products and their impact
• Posting on social media
• Inviting them to the Beta launch
• Providing giveaways and discounts from business partners through Instagram and facebook - "hooked model external triggers triggers" ... redirects to our site and required download of extension

How will the solution address their needs:

• Incentivize positive impact = gamification + custom food suggestions
• Create a better social/moral brand for users
• Improve lifestyle
• Improve transparency by bringing product data to consumers - J: businesses get this on their own site (i.e. how many items of this were bought this month, year, etc therefore we discontinue this product and keep this product) so we have to prove that we are the business to do this by partnering with us
• Long-term: ability to interact with other users engaged in sustainability through a social platform

The greatest challenge within the food economy is to incentivize consumers to buy sustainable and nutritious products while encouraging producers to prioritize responsible practices. We are tackling the lack of incentives and transparency in food systems. Rather than just providing producers with various abilities to be sustainable, we create the need to use them. We influence those who wield the most power in the value chains: consumers. By nudging our target population towards healthy and sustainable choices, we create real economic incentives for producers to improve their businesses. Our platform will be a catalyst to supply consumers with better food.

Any food delivery app that is partnered with grocery stores (i.e. instacart) are indirect competitors because they have established partnerships with Walmart, wholefoods, etc, and an application running, would be easy to adopt it as a chrome extension and give business insights to consumer purchasing back to their partners. We are less focussed on becoming part of the supply chain and more on providing a fun, easy, informative way to incentivize consumers to make the right choices. We also take advantage to create a network effect by essentially creating a global loyalty program for sustainable and healthy food and products.

Almond is our main competitor= Almond is a free app that empowers you to become carbon balanced by helping you to ‘Buy Better, Act Better and Offset the Rest'. Our product offering is different because it is positioned to be a virtual door that allows consumers to understand how their purchases create a greater impact and how alternative products have impact savings for switching products which we tokenize as rewards to use as discounts for their other continuous sustainable purchases. They also miss out on the social and moral incentives we believe to be key to nudge consumer behavior to choose responsibly. We take advantage of this by showcasing your rank, and allowing you to compete with your friends to be the healthiest and most sustainable consumer.

The core technology to power our solution is a web-browser extension, where we can automate the ability to track consumer purchasing behaviors by using the acceptance of tracking cookies while consumers use web browsers like chrome.

Another core technology would be a robust search query of pre-defined tags or keywords for food products. Through this, we are able to target specific foods and link them with alternative on our platform. This will enable nudges directly on the browser to suggest similar sustainable products.

Another core technology will be Optimal Character Recognition where consumers can directly scan and upload their receipts or labels of products to search for more sustainable brands. Consumers can also link online purchases through our browser add-on to show the amount of impact in tokens, by switching to more alternative solutions.

A big integration would be API with business partners so users can easily purchase sustainable products directly on our application and find discounts.

This technology currently works because we see it in applications like Honey. Honey is a browser extension that automatically finds and applies coupon codes at checkout with a single click. It uses the same nudge, reward program through a token model in their web browser extension. Adopting this current business plan 'Honey' has effectively utilized for 8 years and altering it to fit a sustainable purchasing business model will be easily scaled as it is an accepted technology by 17 million users monthly with over 10 thousand existing partnerships.

Mock-ups: https://www.reallygoodux.io/blog/honeys-new-user-tutorial

Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up9UW71J_NA

Our theory of change:

• Activities: Nudge provides customers with an add-on on their web browser plus a smartphone app to track their grocery shopping behaviors and calculate their footprint (material and environmental). Our technology uses the consumer's data to help them understand the impact of every purchasing decision while providing more sustainable alternatives in the same food category.
• Outputs: Tracking tool for consumers to record the impact of their purchase. Customized suggestions on where to spend, with a focus on groceries sourced sustainably. Social platform with a leaderboard encouraging a competition for doing good.
• Short-term outcomes: Our survey findings show that prospective users are excited with the gamified aspect of purchasing sustainably. Users' engagement seems to be linked with our loyalty program, making suggestions based on purchasing behavior. We also found that "foodies" were more likely to join Nudge for the social aspect of the platform. In the short-term, our technology will benefit niche groups of early adopters.
• Long-term outcomes: Early adopters from niche groups that are active on social media can quickly grow Nudge's user base. Once a critical mass of users adopts our technology, grocery consumption patterns will change, which will force suppliers to reconsider the carbon and material impact of making certain foods.

• Currently: none
• In one year: 20,000
• In five years: 5,000,000

Our goal within the next year is to bullet-proof our business model to be scalable with a full-proof revenue model and cost structure to raise capital and build a full-functioning team.

In a global economy that consumes so many resources, we believe that dealing directly with consumption decisions can have the biggest transformational impact. Since consumer behaviors are often more powerful than regulations, guiding consumers toward sustainable food products will quickly generate a new type of demand. By innovating existing technologies, we can automate and customize users' experience with the ability to scale up responsible consumption.

We align our goals with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as they provide a consistent framework to reach progressive targets. We selected:

• SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being — Incentivizing consumers to make better nutritional choices
• SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production — Transforming the relationship between consumers and producers to facilitate sustainable food choices
• SDG 13: Climate Action — From farming, shipping, cooking, and digesting, food systems represent 68% of emissions globally. Favoring companies that invest in responsible consumption significantly lower emissions.

Our goal in the next five years is to create a cryptocurrency like libra but for sustainability, where we can create a virtual market place with a viable financial infrastructure

• SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure - creating a virtual financial infrastructure that allows small sustainable businesses in rural or non-urban areas to reach a larger target demographic and boost their own economies' GDP. ex: 9.2, 9.3, 9.A, 9.B

Next year:

• Financial: we need more funding to finalize our product launch.
• Market barriers: there are already many apps and add-ons on the market, and we will have to fight hard to capture a good portion of market-share and users' attention.

Next five years:

• Technical: to scale up we will need good partners and advisors
• Legal: the founding team lives in three different countries, and legally settling in a country like the US can prove to be difficult.

• Financial: secure pitch funding and angel investor
• Market barriers: pay social media influencers to showcase their beta testing; go-to-market with early adopters (i.e. sustainable savy millennials)
• Technical: ask networks like the one of MIT Solvers to help us scale up our project
• Legal: move to the US or find a HQ abroad

• 2 full-time staff
• 4 part-time staff

Two people of the team have worked on this part-time for around a year, and tried to implement it within a different organization. We felt like we needed to act quicker and that this had real potential, so we started working on it fully focussed for two months now.

We provide value to our users by increasing transparency on the environmental and social impact of the food they purchase. We also provide value to our users by suggesting them more sustainable alternatives using incentives in the form of an game.

In exchange, we collect users data on what they eat, on their purchasing habits and on their ability to consume sustainably. Our revenue stream essentially comes from selling users' data to firms targeting the exploding market of responsible food consumers. Therefore, our customers are food distribution firms and farms who want to sell to a network of healthy consumers.

We verified that a increasingly large group of consumers would use our platform, assuming we can provide them with valuable data tracking and incentives.