Hi Everyone,

I wanted to share something that I’m hoping will help me when it comes to making better choices about what I buy. While this isn’t about promoting European products in the first instance, it’s designed to help me figure out which brands I currently use, but may need to avoid, so I can find better alternatives that are local, European, allied countries, or even values-led US brands if no other option exists.

Here’s what I did:

  1. Got the idea from Reddit: I saw a post on Reddit with a visual of all the brands owned by big multinational companies. Really helpful to see the visual but there were literally thousands, and I wanted a text list I could feed into an AI chat as a reference document.

  2. Did Some Research: I looked up these multinational companies on Wikipedia which seemed to have a relatively updated list of subsidiary brands, focusing on the parent companies I wanted to steer clear of, like PepsiCo, Nestle etc.

  3. Cleaned Up the List: I used AI tool to organise everything into a neat PDF.

  4. Made It Easy to Use for me with AI: I added the PDF to a chat in Mistral so I can quickly check any products I see in my fridge or cupboard. The AI helps me spot any brands I should avoid. I can also just list the brands off using voice for ease/speed but accuracy suffers a bit. I may also be able to just take a picture but haven’t tried that yet.

The image is the output.

Anybody with access to a simple list and an LLM could do this. Been inspired by the excellent websites and resources others have made and posted here, which I will use to find alternatives - but I first needed to know where the problems were!

Im hoping this will make it easier to buy stuff that aligns with my values. Hope this makes sense and helps someone else too!

  • jlow (he/him)@beehaw.org
    7·
    13 hours ago

    Can you post the PDF, please? As others have said I’d never use AI for ethical and environmental reasons but I’d love to be able to look up which brands to avoid.

    • Mobster@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      1·
      12 hours ago

      not sure how to upload PDFs, sorry.

      Edit: turns out I can’t upload PDFs to lemmy.

      If you wanted to make a list yourself it’s a bit of a hassle but not too hard, I just searched for the Wikipedia pages for each of the following companies, type in something like “List of brands for [company name]”. The companies I picked were:

      1. General Mills
      2. The Coca-Cola Company
      3. Mondelez International
      4. Mars
      5. Procter & Gamble (P&G)
      6. PepsiCo
      7. Nestlé (not a US company, but have avoided for years)

      Once you have the page you can just select the list directly from the page, copy, and then paste into a text doc or something. You could then search from it, and add to it as well. It may be a bit untidy, but search should still work.

      Hope that helps, and sorry I couldn’t share the document directly and save you the hassle.