‘The teams behind the apps’ series: meet The Carbons
'The teams behind the apps' is a series of videos made by the EU
Datathon
[https://data.europa.eu/en/news/op.europa.eu/eudatathon] 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
[https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.datavisualizationsociety.org/__;!!DOxrgLBm!Uaf1rY3yg_uVMwfiEdRgU0s6HfD4dSAelne9e08T1mitsr5p2i7ftUIRnhOUdIwP9rDGe2IuNLZLcRMDlw$].
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
[https://youtu.be/MzyHEw8d4t4]. 

Curious to learn more? Discover all teams and apps via the EU
Datathon website [https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon], and follow
updates on Twitter [https://twitter.com/EU_opendata], 
[https://twitter.com/EU_opendata]LinkedIn,
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-europa-eu] and Facebook
[https://www.facebook.com/data.europa.eu], or via our newsletter
[https://data.europa.eu/en/newsletter]. 

Publication Date/Time
2021-10-08T08:45:00+00:00
Fuel your body without fouling the earth