The Good Guide

You may not be aware of this, but I love gadgets and applications and new programs and basically… toys. Since I am not exactly diving in and out of my gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, cool things that are free pretty much make me do inner cartwheels. (Outer cartwheels usually end in disaster)

Enter The Good Guide for iPhone – you can scan the barcode of a product and the app will tell you the Good Guide rating for that product. What is The Good Guide, you might ask? In their own words:

GoodGuide is building a comprehensive source of information on the environmental, social, and health performance of products and companies. The GoodGuide team works with a network of leading academic institutions, government data sources, non-governmental organizations, and private research firms to bring world-class information to consumers.

I did a little reading on the site about the methodology that they use and I feel like they are fairly up front about the difficulty in rating a company on a 1 to 10 scale when so many factors involved. If a company uses quality natural ingredients but has terrible labor practices, where does that leave you? Should you buy the product or not? They have taken a lot of these things in to account and they also have some warnings about using their data since they can only report using information that has been made public, and that doesn’t always tell the whole story.

Overall, I really like having this app. It helps with decision making in the store and gives you a way to find out about companies that you might not otherwise investigate. I can’t tell you how many pictures I have saved of things I meant to look up later and never did – the age of the internet may be making us stupid in a general sense, but it’s also making us more aware consumers and big companies can’t hide the way they used to.

Click on the picture above to be taken to The Good Guide’s site. There’s a link to the app there and you can also search ‘Good Guide’ in the app store to find it.