New York-based consumer data analytics and food ratings company HowGood announced that it has raised $4.2 million to help finance its growth, R&D in providing increasingly sustainability-minded consumers with SDG ratings on grocery products — food, household products and personal care items.
HowGood’s February 22nd $4.2 million funding brings its total to $6.2 million via nine investors. They first announced their $2 million funding in September 2014.
What HowGood Offers
The 10-year old company assesses products for their environmental, health and trade impacts. Consumers can access some ratings today via HowGood’s website or mobile app. It plans to offer the service in the future via wearables and voice-enabled computing products like Amazon’s Alexa.
Over 135 million “better purchases” over 200,000 rated products have been made, up from 100,000 in 2015 (enclosed video); its ratings of coffee products are among this author’s favorite.
HowGood’s timing may be prescient. The Kombucha product for example, a type of fermented probiotic tea that boasts of its sustainability practices, is so common now in retail stores but was once a niche grocery item. It is now among other “once-hippy” products in a million-dollar industry, according to the New York Times.
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“So far, HowGood has analyzed 200,000 products, mostly food and beverages. It amasses and crunches data from its own proprietary sources, and from a huge range of open government and third-party firms to derive a complete score for different products. Its analysis encompasses everything from ingredient sourcing to chemicals and processing, packaging, shipping and labor practices.
Customers license HowGood’s data and can display scores in their stores if they choose. Some groceries license the data and use it privately to assess their merchandise and make decisions about what they will and won’t continue to stock. Brands may also license the data to see how they stack up against the industry overall from a sustainability perspective.
“Consumers have a blindness to different issues. Au naturel, healthy, fat-free… They see all these confusing labels and say ‘screw it, I’m just buying the cheapest thing.’ But if you say hey, this is the best thing for you to buy based on qualities you care about, then they will buy it and be happier with what they bought,” the investor said.
HowGood CEO Gillett said the company plans to use its new funding to cover an even wider range of products, research and development and work with a greater number of retailers and grocers. Cosmetics and grooming ratings are under way. While he did not yet have permission to name the companies that plan to use its ratings, he said HowGood struck an agreement with at least one major beauty retailer already.
Besides guiding consumers, he said, HowGood gives brands and groceries a far clearer understanding of how sustainable their products really are, compared to the industry, and how that correlates to sales.”
Sources: TechCrunch, Crunchbase, New York Times
