New App Lets You Boycott Monsanto and More

Gone are the days of shopping blindly for goods in stores! Thanks to the launch of a new app called Buycott, you can now stay away from certain brands and products that do not align with your values and in turn makes it easier for you to Support the causes you care most about.

Buycott is available now for iOS and Android devices and is very easy to use. First, shoppers create a profile where they can select causes and campaigns they Support. Then while shopping, simply scan the bar code of a product to see how it stacks up against your cause/campaign criteria. According to Green Biz, the app will pull up information about the product as well as the parent company—whether the company supports or opposes your selected causes/campaigns.

This clever app was started by Ivan Pardo, a 26-year-old freelance programmer. The idea came to him when he watched a friend attempting to track information regarding a company she wanted to boycott and realized that there should be a better way to do that.

“I don’t remember what my friend was trying to avoid, but that was insignificant. It was the fact that people were trying to organize themselves around having their buying habits reflect their principles. They didn’t have a good way to do that. I’d already made a couple of apps at this point and I wanted to improve on their methods,” said Pardo in an interview with Smart Planet.

Currently, the largest campaign through the app is Demand GMO Labeling, reports Forbes. This campaign can tell you if a certain product was produced by one of 36 companies that have donated more than $150,000 to oppose mandatory GMO labeling. For instance, if you scan a carton of Tropicana Orange Juice you’ll see that that the parent company is PepsiCo and that the Demand GMO Labeling campaign suggests it is best to avoid it while scanning a carton of 365 Everyday Value from Whole Foods Market brings up no current campaign conflicts.

There are plenty of apps out in cyberspace today but Buycott cuts through all that noise and offers consumers the transparency so desperately needed these days. To get the app for your Smartphone, just click here.

Image source: Yutaka Tsutano / Flickr