In early May, then-unknown 26-year-old freelance programmer Ivan Pardo quietly added an app he'd spent 16 months creating to the iTunes and Google Play stores. Then he called Forbes, and all his servers crashed.
Los Angeles-based Pardo hadn't anticipated the level of interest in Buycott, a simple but clever tool aimed at enabling shoppers to make smarter choices in the aisles with their smartphones.
Use Buycott on your iPhone or Android to scan the barcode on any product, and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent company. These include headline-hogging conglomerates like Koch Industries (owned by conservative billionaires and liberal bogeymen Charles and David Koch) and Monsanto, the agricultural biotech giant that's become a byword for "evil" among those opposed to genetically modified food.
Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson JNJ -0.81%.
Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations (most of them household names like PepsiCo) that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.
There are also Buycott campaigns encouraging shoppers to support brands that have, say, openly backed LGBT rights. You can scan a bottle of Absolut vodka or a bag of Starbucks coffee beans and learn that both companies have come out for equal marriage.
You can read the whole story of Buycott's creation here. Now that the app is stable and its servers capable of handling lots of traffic, Forbes decided to take it for a test drive in a Manhattan supermarket. Watch the video above and see Buycott in action.
