Vancouver-based Ethical Bean Coffee Co. is tapping into the trend of consumers using smartphones to learn more about the food they consume.
Vancouver’s PortaLife Solutions Inc. has been a pioneer at this. It started selling its CarrotLines iPhone application for $2.99 via Apple Inc.’s iTunes store at the beginning of June.
Shoppers can use CarrotLines to access U.S. Department of Agriculture and Health Canada information to determine whether food products meet their nutritional and lifestyle needs.
Ethical Bean’s iPhone app is set to launch June 15. It could prove to be more popular than CarrotLines because it is free.
Ethical Bean’s app enables shoppers to use Google Earth to map each bag of coffee beans down to the field where they were grown.
Shoppers can also extend their shopping trip by watching interviews with farmers or by looking up profiles of different Ethical Bean roast coffees.
Ethical Bean owner Lloyd Bernhardt was a Business in Vancouver Forty under 40 winner in 1991, when he developed products for the software company GDT Softworks.
His seven-year-old coffee venture now generates $10 million in annual revenue and is Canada’s second largest 100% fair trade certified roaster after B.C.’s Kicking Horse Coffee.
Many local coffee roasters, such as Caffé Artigiano founder and 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters owner Vince Piccolo, have targeted coffee shops as customers for their beans.
Bernhardt has tried a different strategy: selling via Overwaitea Food Group, Sobey’s Inc. and other grocery chains.
“It’s a completely different business model to sell to grocery chains,” he told BIV.
“There’s a real misnomer out there that you can’t get good coffee in the grocery store.”