Carrot Rewards

~ the obit ~

Carrot Rewards was Canadian at the layer that decides whether a product can travel. The step count came off a phone that anybody anywhere already owned, but the payout was Scene points and Petro-Points, currencies that only mean anything inside one country's cinema and gas station habits. None of that ports. I read about this one the way you read about another country's parking policy, with some interest and no stake in it.

Carrot Insights was a Toronto company, a certified B corporation, started in 2015 by Andreas Souvaliotis and Jeff Irwin. The app went live in British Columbia in March 2016 with five million dollars of federal money behind it. Ontario put in another 1.5 million. Newfoundland and Labrador signed on, and the Northwest Territories came last, spending 140,000 dollars on a launch that happened only weeks before the whole thing closed.

The mechanic was simple enough to explain in one line. Walk, or answer a short quiz about diet or personal finance, and points land in a loyalty account you were already carrying. Nothing new to sign up for and nothing to redeem in a currency invented by the app. About 1.1 million people took it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the money worked ~

The user was not the customer. Health ministries were, because a province that gets a few hundred thousand people to walk more is buying something it can put a number on, and the loyalty points were cheaper per head than most of the alternatives. The app was free precisely because somebody with a public budget had already paid.

That is a real business, but it is a business made of contracts that expire. Each province signed for a launch, and a launch is a one-time line item. There is no renewal in the model unless somebody in a ministry decides that year after year of walking is worth its own recurring budget, and nobody did.

~ the day the funding stopped ~

Ernst and Young came in about three months before the end to find a buyer. The offer went out to the market and drew no serious interest, which for a company holding a million active users says something plain about how the market valued a wellness app whose revenue depended on government procurement.

On 19 June 2019 the company said its funds had run out and it could no longer be in business. The app stopped. In the Northwest Territories, where the launch money had barely cleared, the timing read as farce.

~ what got bought ~

In January 2020 Optimity, another Toronto health startup, bought what was left and relaunched the app under its own name. The asset was the user list, not the code. A million Canadians who had already agreed to hand over their step count is a thing worth buying at bankruptcy prices, and the second version quietly moved the customer from a ministry to insurers and employers, which is where wellness apps go when the public money is gone.

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