Social enterprises: Conscious Consumers

Ben Gleisner, CEO and co-founder of Conscious Consumers.

Small business editor Caitlin Sykes this week interviews a handful of people running social enterprises about what they do and how they do it.

Ben Gleisner is CEO and co-founder of Conscious Consumers.

What does Conscious Consumers do?

Conscious Consumers is a New Zealand-based social enterprise that connects businesses with customers interested in social and environmental issues. Our current focus is the hospitality sector, where in the last three years we've signed up more than 400 business members and 10,000 consumers.

We've supported hundreds of these hospitality businesses to adopt more ethical and sustainable practices by connecting them with local suppliers and marketing their efforts to consumers via a free smartphone app and social media.

Where did the idea come from?

A group of friends set up the charity that runs Conscious Consumers just after uni, in 2010. As consumers we found it hard to find businesses that supported social and environmental issues, and the research we did also found that businesses were wanting advice and to build connections in this area. We had a good look in other countries to see if there was a product or technology that could help us out, but couldn't find one - so we decided to build it from scratch here in New Zealand.

What kinds of trends have you seen in this sector during the time you've been in operation?

There are thousands of New Zealand consumers who are making sure the money they spend is encouraging businesses to change the way they operate and when they do they're rewarding businesses to keep striving to do things like use less packaging, reduce their food waste or their carbon footprint.

But while it's getting easier to find the 'good guys', unfortunately these businesses and the consumers who support them are still in the minority. In New Zealand each year we throw away $872 million worth of food that could be eaten, with the average household tossing around 80 kilograms of edible food into the bin each year.

Collectively we also send about 3.2 million tonnes of waste to landfill each year. And our use of plastic is astronomical; we use more than 151 million kilograms of plastic packaging per year and then only recycle 36 million kilograms of that.

But I think a consumer movement is growing and it's being driven by young people. According to the Better Business 2014 Survey by Colmar Brunton, a large number of Gen Xers and Gen Ys in New Zealand are increasingly making their purchasing decisions based on sustainability - and the rate of how often they purchase these products is accelerating every year.

What's next for the organisation?

We've just finished a crowdfunding campaign that raised nearly $100,000 to build a technology called the Good Spend Counter. The idea behind it is to get more businesses doing good, and to show them that their efforts will be rewarded.

Basically, the technology encourages people to set up an online profile and register using their existing Eftpos or credit card, and then identify the issues they care about most - like paying a living wage, caring for animals or using renewable energy - then every time they spend money in any Conscious Consumer accredited business it's counted, and those values are communicated to the business.

The plan is to launch the technology here in November, and there's also been interest from Australia, the UK and Europe, so we're planning to expand with it internationally from late 2016.