Who doesn’t prefer the taste of real, natural fruits to their artificial flavorings? As consumers, our interests are naturally different from those of the producers: when 100 kilograms of raspberry yogurt is produced with artificial flavoring, it costs six cents, while producing the same quantity with real raspberries costs about 30 euros. We aren’t trying to discredit anybody, but we want to point out what’s good.

Experts of the Consumer Advice Center in Hamburg performed a series of foodstuff analyses and has released a list of approved foods that don’t contain artificial flavoring. Since we at barcoo think this information is valuable, we’ve gone and integrated it into our database. Our rationale? Because consuming too much artificial flavoring has the following drawbacks:

Obesity: artificial flavoring stimulates the need to eat more.

Standardized flavors: many foodstuffs are over-flavored, which effects the our sense of taste. Unadulterated, natural flavors no longer taste good to children.

A lack of beneficial ingredients: when we consume artificial flavorings instead of actual fruits, we miss out on lots of vitamins and minerals.

If your smartphone runs out of batteries, try using this new fundamental “decoding help” (unfortunately only in German).

When you buy Fairtrade products you can be sure that “the farmers’ and employees’ living and working conditions are being improved via fair trade prices and premiums. On top of that, child and forced labor are prohibited.” So far so good. Still, it’s all pretty anonymous. And behind fair trade products there are human beings with faces. Though these hadn’t been visible before, that’s changing drastically with barcoo! Whenever Fairtrade has more information about a product’s origin and the people who participated in its production, you can get this information using barcoo.

You can find out which companies or cooperatives work on a product or its ingredients as well as where and under what sorts of conditions they work. Once you’ve scanned the fair trade product in front of you, the information gets integrated into barcoo. When you click on the page of a fair trade product, there are often photo galleries or a history of the producers. So get out there and scan lots of fair trade products… and maybe buy them, too!

Since barcoo’s inception in January 2009 (in Germany), we’ve made an insane amount of changes and developments in just about everything but our app’s design (the very format of the information), which has stayed more or less the same. But the ever-accumulating information on barcoo’s database too often ended up diffusing into endless snaking chains and word blocks, which became quite the eye sore.

Now, after having thoroughly analyzed barcoo’s usage, we’ve developed a whole new design that will enhance your usage of the app. Here’s what it looks like:

There are three so-called ‘tabs’ that structure all of the contents: information, prices and evaluations. The product information is preselected by default (with the food traffic light, the sustainability traffic light and lots of other background information). However, the core information of the other two tabs is still visible in the top righthand corner. This design is immediately available for each of the two million people who’ve already installed barcoo! Marcus is looking forward to your Feedback.

We started a self-servicing portal for German retailers. They can upload any local offer information easily like that. Expansion to other countries will follow in the next months. Full German version of article.