Introducing Cocolist, an app for finding eco-conscious businesses.

Xin chào! I’m Ben, and I live in Saigon, a vibrant city but with an increasingly alarming issue: pollution. While I have taken steps to reduce my own eco-footprint, I wanted to do more.

Saigon has a thriving local business community and at the same time people are becoming more aware about environmental issues. More consumers prefer to choose businesses that have taken steps be greener or shown a commitment to lessen their impact.

And in fact I noticed there are already a lot of businesses in Saigon doing things like reducing single-use plastics or eliminating them entirely, even when it might hurt their bottom line. These businesses deserve to be rewarded for their actions.

But how can eco-conscious customers connect with eco-conscious businesses? Until now, the only way was through word-of-mouth, in Facebook groups^[1][2], or blogs^[3], but these still have one key problem: there is no independent, comprehensive list built on a standardized set of criteria.

That’s why I created Cocolist, This project's goal is to expand into as many cities as possible and cover as many industries as possible such as hospitality and health & beauty. By giving consumers the power of choice, my dream is that Cocolist will inspire more business owners to take action.

Every day in Vietnam for example there are millions of pieces of single-use plastic or styrofoam waste generated in food & beverage industry alone. A single bubble tea or coffee can use up to 4 separate pieces of plastic: a cup, lid, straw and carrier. Local business owners are in a unique position to be game changers in this movement.

At the same time, the reality is that business owners have to take many factors into consideration — e.g. profit margins, convenience, and reliability — when deciding whether or not to use the eco-friendly packaging that is currently available on the market.

Therefore the goal of Cocolist is to incentivize green business practices by giving positive recognition only, and the data being collected reflects that. Along the way, any time a business takes another step, the app will recalculate its score (see below) and publish it.

Cocolist partners with local organizations in order to source content, ensure data accuracy, and help support those organizations. If you're interested in adding data for your city, please contact us at partners@cocolist.app.

Cocolist is using the Green Restaurant Association’s Green Restaurant Certification Standards^[4] as a guide for choosing what data points to collect and how to evaluate each business's environmental accomplishments. These accomplishments are then grouped into categories with a number of corresponding badges shown on the business's profile: