Giki App Launches Hero Badge to Identify Most Sustainable and Healthiest Products in UK Supermarkets

Giki, the Social Enterprise committed to making it easy to find sustainable, healthy and ethical products, today announced the new release of its Hero badge, available on the Giki app. The Hero badge rewards the most sustainable and healthy products available in major UK supermarkets, drawing together information from all of Giki’s badges. Each product must have a combination of sustainability and health badges to earn its “hero” status. Giki’s Hero badge has already rewarded over 9,000 products across food and drink, skincare and haircare, and household cleaning, giving users many options to choose from in order to make choices that are better for the environment and healthier for them.

Launched in May 2018, Giki is a mobile app that informs users about the UK supermarket products they buy and the companies they buy from, by awarding badges to products based on sustainability, health and fairness. Giki’s aim is to make sustainable living easier by providing transparent, independent information which connects consumer values with their shopping decisions, allowing them to scan products’ barcodes through the app and see which badges have been awarded by the social enterprise. Giki encourages full transparency and sustainable consumption by drawing on a number of different data sources such as product information, government guidelines and scientific research.

The new Hero badge follows a strict screening process using Giki’s 13 other badges to select products that do not have a very high carbon footprint, don’t contain palm oil which is not sustainable and where applicable, support animal welfare, fairtrade and sustainable fishing. Once a potential product has passed these restrictions, it must get 4 badges out of the following to receive its Hero status: Responsibly Sourced, Organic, Better Packaging, Low Carbon Footprint, Animal Welfare, No Additives, Healthier Options, or be Supergreen – which means green on pack traffic light indicator for salt, sugar and fats. A basket of Hero products will help materially reduce the overall environmental impact of shopping compared to the UK average (up to 30%) with less carbon, water and land use as well as greater biodiversity when it has a strong spread of organic products too.

“As the food and drink we consume makes up around a quarter of our total environmental impact, choosing sustainable food is a really good way to reduce our impact” says Jo Hand, co-founder of Giki. “In addition, a sustainable diet can cost less than a regular one, due to the reduction in meat and cheese which tend to be an expensive component of the weekly shop.”

The Giki mobile app offers a simple way to find healthier and more sustainable alternatives to products, based on major academic and scientific studies from around the world and drawing on 280,000 UK supermarket products in the Giki database. The app uses a combination of human research and raw computing power, translated into a point system that awards badges to sustainable, healthy and responsible products. With the new Hero badge, Giki now highlights star products helping to live a sustainable lifestyle.