Product life story labels

Dole Organic lets consumers “travel to the origin of each organic product”. By typing in a fruit sticker’s three-digit Farm Code on Dole Organic’s website, customers can find the story behind their banana. Each farm’s section on the website includes background info, shows photos of the crops and workers and tells consumers more about the origin of Dole’s organic products. As our sister website trendwatching.com states in its latest briefing: “Now that carbon footprinting has become a household term in mature consumer societies, expect consumers’ desire to find out about the origins of a product to become a given. Questions no one ever asked a few years ago will become an integral part of the purchasing process. How was the product made? By whom? How did it get to its point of sale? What effects on the environment will it have after purchasing?” Opportunities? If you’re in production, keep the stories and information coming. As consumers become more educated and aware, and demand more background information on the products they’re shopping for, manufacturers will need to provide more transparency. In Dole’s case, this would include showing how much local workers are paid, how much fruit is produced on the farms, which percentage of Dole’s fruit is organically farmed, etc. For more, check out the (still) made here briefing, which describes Tesco’s carbon footprint labels, Timberland’s nutritional labels on shoe boxes and other examples of how companies are experimenting with ‘life story labels’.