Money where your mouth is
Website to rate products on social responsibility
Chocolate and peanut butter are an inherently appealing combination, but Clay Ward has a particularly vested interest in these two pantry staples.
In March 2007, Ward and his wife, Lucy Mendel, founded Buy It Like You Mean It, a nonprofit Cambridge-based organization and website devoted to reviewing corporations' commitment to socially responsible behavior.
By this August, they - with the help of a phalanx of volunteers - hope to roll out a database of rankings and information based on reviews of chocolate manufacturers, providing consumers with access to the information via text message while they shop.
Shoppers "just have to pick up a cellphone, send a text message with a bar code number, and they'll receive a text message back that tells them exactly what our community says in numerical terms: Does this product meet your concerns or not?" Ward explained.
Based on their research, the volunteers write reviews addressing a long list of concerns, such as a company's labor practices, treatment of animals, emissions of greenhouse gases, and how the company packages and transports its products. (But not taste or product quality.)
The idea for the project blossomed out of a purchase of a jar of organic peanut butter, which Ward says he eats on everything from ice cream to cereal.
"I was thinking about a jar of peanut butter and what it means to buy a jar of it - what you can learn from the label and what you can't," said the 32-year-old Cambridge resident. "I think our generation wants to go beyond organic, because they don't really know exactly what that means. It's been contested in Congress, and people have changed their mind about what it is to be organic, and I just think we need a system to talk about things like that."
As the project grew, Ward left his job with the MIT Student Art Association last September to become the group's first full-time volunteer. About a dozen other volunteers assemble for board meetings to discuss the group's aims and technological initiatives, such as the database underpinning the review website. The group has received a couple of grants from MIT to fund operating expenses, which totaled $11,000 in the first eight months.
From the meetings emerged a desire to cover one product as comprehensively as possible. "Chocolate is fun and sexy, but there are also a lot of known issues with the whole chocolate industry," including such issues as fair trade, organic regulations, and industry standards, Ward said.
The group held its official launch party on June 3 at Taza Chocolate, a direct trade, small-batch, organic chocolate company housed in a warehouse building in Somerville. Young parents feeding babies from Born Free bottles (made without the chemical Bisphenol-A) mingled with guests sampling vegetarian food from RedBones and sipping bottles of donated Sam Adams beer, while two volunteers costumed as ravens made the rounds, explaining their symbolic significance.
"In Norse mythology, these two ravens, Hugin and Munin, carry information to Odin," said Analucia Berry, a volunteer graphic and website design consultant for the organization.
Her husband, Paul Abel, donned one of the costumes, which consisted of hockey shin guards tied together as makeshift shoulder pads, and black cloth feathers draped over a black bicycle helmet attached to a beige cardboard beak.
Abel's red T-shirt, beige cargo shorts, and Solomon shoes completed the outfit. Like the ravens, Berry added, the website will give people information while they're shopping, so "you don't just have what the company's advertising is telling you or what the store is telling you."
By August, Berry said, the organization hopes to have 200 chocolate reviews posted to its website, along with 1,000 ratings of those reviews. Users can see a review of a company's labor relations, for example, and then assign a numerical rating for how important they think that factor is.
"The first step is not even for people to create reviews but to go online and rate other people's reviews," Ward added. "We need a lot of people to go through those reviews and rate them because we really depend on a 'wisdom of the crowds' type of model, where everybody votes for what they think is right. That's where we come up with knowledge that we share with people."
He noted that Cambridge is an ideal city for testing the service because the information depends both on young users - students and the technologically savvy - to generate activity on the website, as well as older users - "people like my parents' generation . . . who have the money and the consumer power" - to make the technology effective.
More information is available at buyitlikeyoumeanit.org. 