Karino AyakoT Card, one of the most popular reward cards in Japan, is creating “T Card Minna no Ethical Food Lab.” This co-creative platform will promote ethical food actions and stir up a “sustainable food” movement. It intends to utilize T Card’s big data to put forth dialogue with stakeholders of various industries together with its consumers about ethical food.
The operator of T Card, CCC Marketing Co., Ltd. in Shibuya, Tokyo, sees more than 5 billion purchase transactions a year and 6 billion types of product data handled by a network of 200,000 stores. Leveraging on its big data, which can trace offline and online food-related behavior from 70 million customers, they think they can create a social impact on food and its sustainability.
Through “T Card Minna no Ethical Food Lab,” they hope T Card members who actively engage in ethical eating habits and experts with diverse perspectives in the field of ethical food, SDGs, and marine policy etc., will engage each other. The company hopes this will lead to tackling two challenges to create an ethical food culture. The first challenge is developing products making use of unused resources. The second is creating an “ethical food score,” an index score that allows consumers to make better choices in consumption behavior.
The first challenge has already been given form through the “Goto’s Fish Project,” a project that the company started in June 2018 in Goto City, Nagasaki Prefecture. The project utilized most of the unused fish from the fisheries and succeeded in producing “Goto’s Fish Ham” in November in the same year.
Meanwhile, their second challenge in creating an “Ethical Food Score” is in the making. They hope these scores can encourage their consumers to make better consumption choices in their lives.
