Crowdsourced app helps users find fair trade products

The Fair Trade Finder app offers a crowdsourced platform, enabling users to find and spread the word about fair trade products in local stores.

There are more than 10,000 fair trade-certified products available today in the United States alone, according to California-based Fair Trade USA, but finding them isn’t always easy. That’s where the free Fair Trade Finder app comes in, with a crowdsourced approach to helping ethically minded consumers find and spread the word about fair trade products in local stores. Similar in many ways to Material Short Stories — the service that helps product designers find sustainable new materials — Fair Trade Finder gives Facebook, Android and iPhone users a new way to find stores in their area that sell fair trade-certified products. Not only can users of the app search for such products nearby, but they can also add new ones by tagging, photographing and uploading the items they come across in stores. Then, they can share their finds with friends via Facebook or Twitter. Fair Trade Finder is now available on Facebook as well as in the Android Market and the iTunes store. App-minded entrepreneurs: what other categories of goods are still hard to find? Spotted by: Murray Orange