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:
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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.
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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.
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Cleaned Up the List: I used AI tool to organise everything into a neat PDF.
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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!
Why not just ctrl-f the PDF?
Because AI.
With AI, it might randomly forget stuff that is on the list, and it might randomly add to the list. Personally I wouldn’t rely on it
that’s an unlikely fear. Retrieval-augmented generation is pretty good these these days especially for simple prompts like this.
That’s pretty neat! While I see the concern of not using AI for everything. These projects are good for practice and provide motivation. This in turn gives a sense of achievement and maybe lead to bigger things. That to me makes this worth it. Great job.
Thank you
I feel like having a csv (or any table) and searching that would have the same result, work offline, and be much less computationally intensive?
You’d need a list of every single product and brand that you want to avoid these companies own thousands of brands.
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From what op wrote, they have a list of brand names they wants to avoid. Asking about doritos, and searching for it in a table, would have about the same result from that starting point.
From their other comment, they only have a list of main corporations.
https://feddit.uk/comment/15726732
They copied the list of brands owned by each of those conglomerates from Wikipedia.
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.
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:
- General Mills
- The Coca-Cola Company
- Mondelez International
- Mars
- Procter & Gamble (P&G)
- PepsiCo
- 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.
There’s lots of diiferent file hosts for exactly this purpose. I’m partial to this one: https://catbox.moe/
Thank you for that. I thought it would be blocked where I live, but seems to work.
Here is a link to the source document
https://files.catbox.moe/jtmcb5.pdf
OK so here are some brands butter kiss twinning English breakfast tea Hovis seed sensations KP peanuts tonics, caramel wafers Mentos pure chewing gum Tropicana juice after eight mince Doritos mild salsa Hellmann’s mayonnaise Hellmans mustard Rubicon sparkling mango Vera Moretti, innocent
Seems like more commas would help it interpret this list.
Agreed. I was speaking into the phone while looking in the cupboard, and this was how it recorded it.
You could edit it before sending it. Seems like you’re putting a lot of faith in AI for some reason.
Yes, the screenshot was the first time I used it. Will know to edit in future
I used to use dragon when I got tired of typing sometimes, so now I gotta stop myself from saying all the punctuation in my sentences out loud.
But maybe try that, a lot of dictation software recognises it.
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Twinings English Tea should be avoided because it’s dogshit. Buy English English Tea. Nobody else seems to get it right.
Twinings is English.
(But if you want actual great tea, get Yorkshire Gold.)
I don’t get it. You’re making fun of the person using the spicy word predictor, right?
Sorry, I’m not familiar with the reference.
