‘The teams behind the apps’ series: meet The Carbons
Fuel your body without fouling the earth
'The teams behind the apps' is a series of videos made by the EU Datathon finalists. Get to know the people and their proposals for apps over nine episodes, once a week, in a run-up to the final event. At the competition finals in November the teams will pitch their apps to the jury who will select the winners.
In this fourth episode you get to meet ‘The Carbons’, a team competing from India with their app: Carbon FOODprint. They are competing with two other teams in challenge 1: ‘A European Green Deal’. Their motto? Fuel your body without fouling the earth. As an application that provides interactive data visualisations, The Carbons aims to help people become healthier and make more sustainable food choices. By raising awareness about the carbon footprint of certain foods, the entire food system can become more sustainable and the farm-to-fork strategy can truly come to life.
Aishwarya Shastry, Kuhu Gupta, and Nishtha Bhan are the people behind The Carbons and they joined us for an interview in which they talked about the app, the idea that led to its creation, and the progress so far.
How are you doing with the app? What’s the status?
It’s going great! We have the back end ready with our data APIs and a recommendation algorithm that will enable the application to suggest greener food choices. We’re now working on the front end of the application, and that will hopefully go as planned.
How did you come up with the idea for this app?
Before we learned about the EU Datathon, one of our team members, Kuhu, was having a casual Friday dinner with her friends. Dinner conversations turned to how food is packaged, that is, the amount of packaging and the types of packaging that are used (a riveting dinner conversation for engineers), and how it’s just a wasteful process from end to end. The idea had taken root in Kuhu’s mind and the EU Datathon popped up right in time –the stars had aligned – so we decided to take that forward and work on our app to educate people on how to pick the less wasteful, greener option.
Why did you decide to take part in the EU Datathon?
Until January 2021, Kuhu was the General Director (Early Career) of the data visualisation society. She then transitioned into being an active member. The EU Datathon came to her attention when the link and event details were shared in her ‘Data Viz’ Slack group. After reading more about it, and having recently learned about the greenhouse gas emissions linked to food, she decided to reach out to Aishwarya to find a solution and work on the Datathon project together. Once they realised that their idea had been selected and was actually an amazing one, they brought me (Nishtha) in to be the go-to-market / sales / marketing strategy lead. Since then we’ve been going full steam ahead!
To find out more about The Carbons, watch their 1-minute video.
Curious to learn more? Discover all teams and apps via the EU Datathon website, and follow updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or via our newsletter.