Winner Spotlight: Forkful & Warming Potential
Josh and Imogen are a pair of makers from Australia who build digital products that help make the world a better place. Combining their passion for nourishing food with the desire to live sustainably, they’ve created a service for calculating environmental impact of products and an app to help people eat more thoughtfully.
They created Warming Potential and Forkful for The Climate Fixathon, finishing as runner up for our Facilitation award and winning the ZEIT Award.
Hey Josh and Imogen, thanks for competing in The Climate Fixathon! What was your background before getting involved?
Josh: I’m a Product Architect and all-round maker. I have a background as a professional musician, designer and software developer.
Imogen: My main area of focus is project management and communications. I have official training in the creative industries and hold an MBA in cultural management.
What motivated you to take part in the Fixathon?
Josh: Any excuse to build something with tangible impact. There hasn’t been enough investment in tackling climate-related issues, and it was inspiring to be part of an event focused on building real solutions. Plus it’s always nice to have some friendly competition.
Imogen: We’ve both made a big effort to reduce our environmental impact, and at some point, we figured that all our accumulated knowledge probably had a wider audience than our long-suffering family and friends. It’s very easy to feel powerless in the face of the sheer magnitude of climate breakdown, so the Climate Fixathon was a great incentive to narrow the scope with a clear goal and deadline.
Where did you get the idea for your project?
Josh: We approached it first by researching the highest priority changes that need to occur. According to Project Drawdown — the leading research organisation that ranks climate solutions — Reduced Food Waste and a Plant-Rich Diet are the 3rd and 4th most viable global climate solutions, reducing 70.53 and 66.11 gigatons (that’s 66.11 billion metric tons) of CO2eq respectively.
Imogen: It soon became clear that a project focused on these food-related issues would only tell half the story, and it was important to also cover the health aspect of food choice. Diet has become an increasingly serious international health risk, with a recent study showing that in 2017, 11 million deaths were attributed to dietary risk factors in 195 countries.
Luckily, there’s a lot of crossover between diets that are good for us, and those that are good for the planet. We’re both passionate about healthy and sustainable eating, so we then focused on solving our own problems through this lens.
Josh: Both of us tend to approach a lot of things, including food, with a cost/benefit mindset. There is always a trade-off between the value obtained and the cost of our decisions.
We initially wanted an easier way to find and support local food producers. After iterating on this, we came to realise — through extensive research — that food choice is a much bigger determiner of impact than its origin alone. Unfortunately, most countries don’t have any standardised system to display the impact of food choices. So we decided to build one.
Imogen: Right! We couldn’t find any concrete solutions that made it easier to make better-informed choices without requiring a lot of manual input from users. We wanted to build a simple-to-use, accurate and unbiased way of understanding the impact of food not only on the planet but also on our bodies. And so Forkful was born: a food discovery app that analyses ingredients to provide a combined score for nutritional benefit and environmental impact.
Josh: After scaffolding the impact service for Forkful — which calculates accurate statistics on a product’s environmental impact over its entire lifecycle — we realised that providing easy-access to this kind of data would be useful to countless other developers. So we created Warming Potential, the world’s first API for life-cycle analysis.
How did you find the build process for your project?
Imogen: Josh and I have complementary skill sets, so we’re good at filling in each other’s blanks. While he’s the kind of person who plays with data for fun, I’m more interested in connecting with users and creating narratives. One of the biggest challenges for both of us in this project was knowing when to stop researching and start creating.
Josh: Of course, there are always challenges and times when you want to pivot, but it’s important to fully test your hypothesis before throwing in the towel. I’m quite good at anticipating future use cases and features — it can be a blessing and a curse — so I often have to resist the urge to prematurely optimise. Setting well-defined deadlines helps keep things in check.
We decided to create Warming Potential as its own service fairly late in the game, and since it’s quite complex it will take some time to fully mature.
Do you know of many people using your project yet? What’s the response been like?
Josh: Overall, really positive. We currently have a small but growing user base for Forkful. It’s still in beta and you can join the fun here. Warming Potential is still in private beta, you can register your interest in the public beta here.
What do you hope your project can achieve in the future?
Josh: We’d love to see our approach become widespread and believe it is something that will be replicated and eventually standardised world-wide. Producers can only do so much, and the big changes need to be consumer-driven.
Imogen: We wanted Forkful to be welcoming, inclusive, and most importantly data-driven. Food choice can be so personal and emotional, and it was really important to us that we weren’t creating something that added fuel to the diet wars or advocated for a specific ideology. It’s so easy to say that we should all go vegan for the planet, or that local produce is always better, but the reality is far more nuanced. I’d love for Forkful to help more people adapt to a sustainable, healthy diet, one meal at a time.
Did you learn anything new about the climate emergency in the process of building your project?
Josh: We were aware of the impact that food has, but our research has further strengthened our position. Learning is one thing, but the real cash-value is implementing what we learn into our daily lives.
Imogen: I was most struck by how impactful demand-side changes can be. It’s easy to demonise big corporations for their negative contribution, but all organisations are built and run by… people. And they’re responding to consumer demand. The daily choices of 7.7 billion individuals sure do add up.
Now that the Fixathon is finished, what are your future plans for your project?
Josh: We will continue to grow both Forkful and Warming Potential. We aim to stay nimble but may consider capital, given the right partnership.
Imogen: There is a lot that we want to do with both of these projects, and it’s exciting to hear users requesting features that are already on our packed roadmap. For Forkful, in the short term, we’re looking at favourites, integrated shopping lists, alternative ingredient suggestions, custom recipes and much more.
Are you thinking about continuing to work in the environmental space beyond your project?
Josh: To quote Elon Musk, “Why wouldn’t you try to make the future better, if you are going to be a part of it?” If we can contribute something meaningful, we would like to do so.
Imogen: Definitely! It’s a matter of priorities. Sure, there are a thousand different interesting things I’d love to work on in the future, but right now I’m focused on helping to make that future possible. As Bill Nye put it, “The planet is on f***ing fire.” There’ll be plenty of time to start my bonsai collection and build a dating app for dogs once we’ve stopped tearing apart our home.
Were there any other Fixathon projects you were particularly impressed by? If so why?
Josh: I thought Zapling, AirCare and Carboin are really well-thought-out projects.
Imogen: I loved those three, as well. I liked the idea of monetising positive climate actions in From Us and would like to see where that project goes.
Do you have any recommended resources that helped you learn about climate breakdown and create your project?
Josh: There’s a ton of great research out there if you’re willing to dig. We reference some of the more relevant resources on Forkful’s landing page.
Imogen: Despite what the climate sceptics like to believe, there is a ton of incredible research available for you to draw on. Start with the major reports coming out of organisations like the UNFCCC, FAO, Project Drawdown, The Lancet, etc., and drill down into your niche from there.
Finally, with the experience of launching a project aiming to help fix the climate behind you. What advice would you give to other makers who want to make something to help but aren’t sure what?
Josh: Solve your own problems. Think about how you can best minimise your impact, solve that, and then make it easier for other people to do the same.
Imogen: What he said. Don’t get overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. We need billions of people fighting climate change imperfectly, not a few people doing it perfectly.
The Climate Fixathon is the world’s first online hackathon to help fix the climate. It ran from 2nd-30th August 2019 with more than $10k in prizes won. You can learn more at fixathon.io.
