GoodGuide

» see goodguide.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Dara O'Rourke was a Berkeley professor, which is the kind of job where you spend a career documenting what happens in the factories behind consumer goods and then watch nobody change what they buy. GoodGuide grew out of an earlier project of his called Tao-It, and it tried a different lever: put the research in the aisle, in the half second before somebody picks something up.

The site went live around 2009 and the iPhone app followed that November with the feature everything depended on. Point the camera at a barcode and the product came back with three numbers out of ten against it. Health was one. The other two covered what making the thing had cost the environment and how the company behind it behaved. Underneath them sat an unglamorous amount of work on manufacturing inputs and pollution, and on what the parent corporation funded with its profits. It raised $3.73 million in a first round reported in January 2009 and another $5.5 million that June.

Barcodes are regional, and GoodGuide's database was built on what sits on American shelves. A Turkish supermarket in 2010 was full of products it had never heard of, which is the plain reason this never became a thing anyone around me used. The idea traveled anyway. Every ingredient-scanner app on a phone today is running a narrower version of the loop GoodGuide built, usually for one category instead of all of them.

~ the case file ~

~ the three scores ~

The scoring was the whole product and also its hardest problem. Compressing a supply chain into one integer invites the argument that the integer is wrong, and GoodGuide took that argument constantly, from manufacturers who disliked their number and from researchers who disliked the method.

What it was genuinely good at was the thing that is hard to do any other way: making the invisible part of a purchase visible at the moment of purchase. Reading a forty page corporate responsibility report at home changes nothing. A six out of ten on a shampoo bottle while you are standing in front of the shelf is a different kind of fact.

~ the laboratory years ~

In August 2012 UL Environment, the sustainability arm of Underwriters Laboratories, bought it. That was a sensible home on paper. UL has been putting its mark on products since the nineteenth century and the whole company is a machine for turning testing into a symbol consumers trust, which is a longer version of what GoodGuide was doing in an aisle. Coverage at the time said the free web and mobile apps would carry on as usual.

They did carry on, for almost eight years, which few consumer apps parked inside a certification business manage. What never arrived was the thing the acquisition was supposed to unlock. UL's weight did not turn three scores out of ten into a standard anybody had to answer to, and GoodGuide stayed a well-regarded side project in a company whose real customers were manufacturers rather than shoppers.

~ the day the database closed ~

It shut on 1 June 2020 with no public explanation and no successor named. goodguide.com stopped resolving entirely, so there is not even a parked page left to read. Eleven years of researched product scores went off the public web in a day, and one of the clearest surviving records that the shutdown happened at all is a line in a Bloomberg story about Amazon's climate promises, published three months later.

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