Rewarding behavior: Moving more sustainable grocery picks up the food chain

Trawling the supermarket aisles for dinner, most people’s eyes gravitate to the price tag and preparation time. An oven-ready beef lasagna might look like a more attractive option than a vegetable stir-fry that requires chopping, sautéing and cleaning up.

However, by prioritizing cost and convenience, shoppers often ignore one factor — the carbon footprint that dinner leaves behind. It’s not that most people are impervious to their environmental impact; in fact, recent surveys show the majority want to live a more sustainable life. But amid price pressures and time constraints, more sustainable choices all too often fall by the wayside.

It’s a gap London-based entrepreneur Freddie Lintell is confident he can close by making it easier to make those choices. His company Reewild offers an AI-powered carbon tracking meal planner app that includes emissions data from 1.2 million products and provides recipes measured by carbon usage.

But since launching his business three years ago, he’s realized most U.K. consumers need more incentives to start tracking their carbon footprint in the same way they might monitor their calorie intake.

That’s why Reewild is now piloting an eco-reward solution that takes inspiration from airline frequent flyer programs. It offers points for buying low-emissions products that can be swapped for rewards such as energy bill discounts or free e-bike rentals.

“The wider vision is to offer points for low-impact products that you buy across every consumer packaged good, which can then be redeemed back into the green economy to enable a virtuous cycle of better behaviors,” he says.

With the spending power of “eco-active” consumers tipped to soar from $500 billion to $1 trillion by 2027, Reewild is tapping into the growing pressure on brands to burnish their sustainability credentials to meet regulatory requirements and help consumers understand the impact of their purchases.

After working for seven years in sustainability-focused jobs, including helping build a carbon-neutral subscription business for flowers, the 33-year-old, who is married to a professional chef, began developing the idea for Reewild after discovering food systems generate a third of global emissions.

Brainstorming how he could use his experience working with brands and retailers to communicate their environmental impacts, he began delving into the complexities of carbon food labelling and building a network of contacts.

Then, to nudge consumers in the right direction, his team began building Reewild’s meal planner app, which rates product emissions using “carbon calories” with one gram of CO2 equaling one carbon calorie. Based on its calculations, for example, five ounces of “very high” impact shrimp are worth 1,924 carbon calories, or the emissions equivalent of driving five miles by car.

Linking users to supermarkets to buy ingredients, the app helps people easily plan meals with carbon-rated recipes from popular chefs such as vegan stuffed mushrooms at 283 carbon calories and beef tacos at 5,023 carbon calories — almost 20 times more than the mushrooms).

Lintell also wants to challenge the notion that shopping sustainably costs more.

He calculates that people can save up to $1,800 a year by using the app while slashing 35% from their carbon emissions.

“We’re really trying to set the cheapest product and the greenest product as the default for customers,” Lintell says. “That’s one of the most influential ways of nudging consumer behavior.”

Now Reewild has joined the Mastercard Start Path, the company’s startup engagement program as part of the payment network’s push to create ecosystems that make more sustainable consumption possible. Harnessing the Mastercard’s expertise, technology and connections, Lintell hopes Start Path will help Reewild scale up its rewards program, currently being piloted with CH&CO, which is owned by the food services giant Compass Group PLC, which runs the cafeterias at University College London.

So far, the Reewild rewards are proving popular with UCL’s eco-conscious students, who are using the points they accumulate from choosing low-impact lunches to redeem free coffees or vegetarian meals.

With ambitions to eventually take Reewild’s rewards scheme global, Lintell is confident countries will standardize ways to display carbon footprint data alongside nutritional food labels to make it easier to choose more sustainable options – benefiting the environment as well as consumers’ wallets.