Being an avid user of a number of services that really are very different to the incumbents… I was wondering what others thought were good products or services to get involved in.
My top 4 I would currently highly recommend:
Monzo - money transparency and understanding
Huel - nutritionally balanced, low cost, more environmentally focused food
Freetrade - simple to use, low cost and with a side of education, investing
Bulb - renewable energy
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Some examples of companies which are simply not on this list would be Coca-Cola with their recent declaration of understanding of people’s need for single use plastics.
There are other great services which I think everyone should know about but don’t consider them very 2020 are for example Marcus, also in this case they’re owned by a massive bank, which has been around for ages.
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Ps. I use the word woke in a generic slang form.
I also always found the word incumbent in business terms confusing - a company or product that is already established with a demonstrated level of success in the market.
I would highly recommend Splosh, they produce cruelty free, and environmentally friendly, household products, such as cleaning products, shower gel, detergent etc.
You buy a starter box from them with the products you want, they’ll all arrive bottled, from then on you only need to buy refill packs and refill your bottles at home. You can even send your refill packs back once you’re finished with them for Splosh to reuse and lower your environmental impact even further.
Sorry but, what? how is the processing of food into a powder more environmentally focused than actually eating the plants it’s all derived from anyway?
Well, splitting hairs because the only difference I can see there is the ‘ground up’ bit. Food is also adapted to make it more appealing in a shop, indeed “baby carrots” are just normal carrots ‘ground down’ to be smaller. And shops discard ugly carrots, and lots of carrots go mouldy in people’s fridges. Huel consumers are likely to eat 100% of the Huel they buy so there is almost zero food waste after purchase. Along with minimal packaging and direct delivery you could argue Huel is more environmentally focussed.
Or you can buy carrots in a supermarket or grocers, that aren’t in any packaging and only buy what you need so they never go to waste. It’s very achievable, we do it every week…
I’ll restate the basic assumption - reprocessing ANY food into being another food is, inherently, less environmentally friendly as it’s adding extra steps. Packaging, transport, waste and, likely, about the same regardless (just because people pay for Huel doesn’t make them any more likely to not waste any than people who buy vegetables).
Anyway, it was a minor point and I don’t have the energy for a debate for the sake of it, so I’ll mute and move on.
Well I’ve already repeated my stance twice so not sure what else I’d say.
phildawson
(Sorry, I will have to escalate this.)
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Growing your own, buying local, or just buying veg without all the plastic wrap. I would say the conversation over carrots vs huel is taking it a bit far.
The business would need to be demonstrating to me how they really help support people, fight forms of injustice, or how they are helping the environment etc to be woke.
I think FreeTrade is pushing that as a woke service but it is a disrupter certainly to paying £12 a pop on each buy/sell and making the experience nicer and more approachable.
Other than https://green.energy/ I don’t what else would qualify for me, we use our local zero waste shop in town for home stuff.
It was an example. I stand by my statement that Huel simply cannot be “more environmentally focused” as the OP suggested. That’s all I’m saying.
Moving on, we’ve started using an app that lets you get ‘close to out of date’ food (some dated today, some yesterday) which by and large is still perfectly edible but the supermarkets were gonna throw out… if I could just remember the NAME of the app/service that’d help.
We use smol for clothes.
Halo for coffee capsules that are fully-compostable (my Nespresso machine is about 6 years old).
I use that Salt deodorant thing. And so on… are they all ‘woke’ or just ‘aware’?