GoodGuide, the service that tells you how environmentally friendly your bottle of shampoo or other household product is, now tracks food items. And not just nutritional content either. The site puts food items up against the same microscope it does for all the other products in its database, showing you how a food item stacks up against others in the same category, and what kind of score the parent company has.
Essentially it's all the things that makes GoodGuide really work, like finding out if your laundry detergent is killing polar bears; something you can now check for your breakfast cereal.
For now, the database of food products is right around 5,000 items, a number which GoodGuide founder Dr. Dara O'Rourke says will be growing by "tens of thousands" in the next few weeks. In the meantime, something that's noticeably missing is junk food. This is by design and meant to encourage people to search for and discover healthy food items. This means that Oreo cookies, Easy Cheese, Hostess Twinkies, and a good number of candy items are nowhere to be found, which I found slightly disappointing. While it's great to know what a good job you're doing by buying locally-grown organic cereal and free-range beef, half of the fun of the site can be discovering which products are an absolute scourge both to your body and the earth.
GoodGuide now tells you how good or bad your favorite foods are. In this case you should stay away from this mac and cheese.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
A very useful resource for parents.
One of my favorite companies from the TechCrunch 50 launch conference was GoodGuide (review), a slick database of safety and social responsibility data on consumer products. At launch, the service covered health, beauty, and cleaning products. Launching now (and as originally promised): coverage of toys, and the company's iPhone app.
Cutting to the chase: The GoodGuide database will tell you if that toy you're thinking of buying has lead in it. Based on that, I'm sold. And having that info available on the run, via the new free iPhone app, makes it that much more useful.
The database could be bigger, though. I could not find many of my son's favorite Thomas the Tank Engine products in the system.
GoodGuide also tracks other health data for children's products. It will tell you about the use of chlorine (and indicator of phthalates) in products, and of other chemicals like arsenic and bromine.
As before, the service also includes social and environmental profiles of the manufacturers whose products it tracks, so you can tell if your toys are made under poor conditions, or if their construction is done at the expense of the environment.
I'd like to see an image recognition engine in the iPhone app (see SnapTell, Pongr) at some point, but I like these new additions to this good service.
Last week I got a glimpse at GoodGuide, a new product recommendation service that rates products as safe, healthy, and green based on their ingredients, manufacturing, and distribution. It's part of a new class of services that are bringing data transparency that can save money, lives, and the environment, not necessarily in that order.
BillShrink.com recently launched a recommendation service that focuses on unpacking the complexity and cost of cell phone plans. The free service analyzes wireless phone bills and rate plans from the major carriers, and then monitors usage and makes recommendations for saving money. Another company, Validas has a similar, though fee-based, service and claims to save customers more than 20 percent on average.
This week, BillShrink is adding credit cards to its service offering.
"No more smoke and mirrors. All fees, risk, and reward will be out in the open on BillShrink.com so people can find the best match for individual needs and feel secure that they're making financial decisions that will actually help build them credit," company CEO Peter Pham said in a statement.
Users enter data about their credit card habits, and BillShrink comes up with recommendations for more cost-effective cards.
BillShrink monitors plans, promotions, rewards programs, and other data points for people, making new recommendations that could save them money. Given the dismal state of the economy and the lack of transparency in many consumer services, BillShrink, Validas, and GoodGuide are tapping a real need.
Pham said that BillShrink could extend its personalized recommendation engine to other domains, such as car insurance and mortgages, where the choices are also confusing and complex, and results can change on a daily or monthly basis. Perhaps these new data transparency services will help prevent some of the obfuscation by service providers and reduce poor decision-making by consumers.
GoodGuide is a new product recommendation system focused on "safe, healthy, and green products." It will tell you what chemicals are in your toothpaste, or if your socks are made with sweatshop labor.
The company's real value add is in acquiring the data on the products. The packaging of the data into a site is the easy part, but we think they've done a great job at it.
That's it, simple story. Looks like a great product and service. iPhone app coming, and expansion into other areas as well: Food, toys, electronics, adding to the current lineup of 60,000+ personal care and clothing items.
GoodGuide ranks products by health and safety.
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