Assignment 8: Solving The Problem

I chose the opportunity I want to focus on because of my personal experience with this issue. I've followed a vegetarian diet since I was 12 years old and began following a vegan diet in January 2018. I can't tell you how frustrating it is when you decide to pop in real quick to a different Publix that you normally do to pick up an essential ingredient for dinner only to realize they don't carry the same vegan products. It's especially irritating to buy a product you think to yourself, "This HAS to be vegan!" only to get home and realize it isn't because it has an added vitamin that comes from boiled sheep wool. Money and time has been wasted because there isn't a label or access to a clear answer on where the ingredients come from. These personal experiences made me see the opportunity that people following a vegan or vegetarian diet face difficulties at the grocery store because they aren't sure which products they can buy since there are questionable ingredients added to products that you can't find out their sources. 

My solution to this problem would ideally come from establishing a requirement that would mandate manufacturers to label the source of ingredients that could come from either an animal source or a plant source. This clear stating label could come in the form of listing the source in parentheses next to the ingredient or like an ingredient warning you find when a product contains peanuts. This solution would be the easiest for consumers and could benefit non-vegan costumers too. This could be marketed as helping people with food allergies or as making people more mindful of what they are consuming. This solution would be the hardest to enact. My second solution would come in the form of a mobile app. There are some others already on the market, but to be honest, they are not very good. They are glitchy, outdated, or are riddled with intrusive ads that take 15 seconds to load. The app would focus on being up-to-date with the newest products, would get their ingredient lists verified from the manufacturer, and would have a user-friendly interface. The app would work as a combination of a bar-code scanning feature that would tell the user if a certain product is inline with their dietary restrictions and would also offer list articles announcing new vegan products or exciting vegan-related news.