See our Latest Progress

Day to Day Benefits

Have your shopping list up to date.

Check at the grocery store if you have the product already at home or when you have last bought that.

Sort your shopping list for optimal route through the hyper market and find that special ingredient for that ethnic food.

The app integrates with most of the messaging apps, e.g. WhatsApp.

Using Kitsain is free and you can use it as anonymous you want.

Naturally, the Scope is not narrowed to food, but it has been the starting point for us. Kitsain covers same service benefits to all household products.

Money, Time and Logistics

Kitsain suggests cheapest and nearest shop or applicable online delivery service for your finished groceries at the moment. Best offer could be even along your way home.

Benefit from paid workers keeping product and price databases up to date. Or take part in price information crowdsourcing to get to know best bargains from different retailers earlier than others.

Kitsain tells where to buy that special trendy product your friends are praising so much.

Gamification

Reach the Planet Saver status, by updating info about discount prices for products, which's BBDs/used by dates are approaching.

Cooking & Food Waste Prevention

Spotted a bargain product? See directly what other ingredients you need in preparing a meal from it - or do you have them already at home!

Kitsain suggests possible meals to prepare from ingredients already in your pantry, fridge or freezer. These recipes have realistic preparing time estimates and dynamic scaling to different portion sizes. Not to forget preparing technique-tweaking hints.

Reminds about products best before dates and suggests meals from those, preventing food waste.

Educate yourself with food and health knowledge by accurate food data, studies and news headline links related to the current product or meal in question.

Data Visualizations

Track your or your family's consumption habits and trends (cost, health, ethical and ecological fooDprint)

Some of the ideas mentioned above will be tested with MVP2.

Mission

We want to change consumption habits, globally - with open source. What Linux did for operating systems, could be done to the global consumption system as well. We would also like to unite consumers world wide at some level, for good.

Business Logic

We will advertise right on time, when the need for a new product or refill is needed. This is completely more advanced and more targeted advertising method than loyalty program ads, for example, which are based maybe in fancy AI but not in actual reality. Kitsain advertisers can be retailers, brands or producers. Commissions from online orders is an another revenue source. B2B subscription model is possible as well for commercial and institutional workplace kitchens and canteens.

Who are the most willing and motivated to take part in product and price data crowdsourcing according to our experience and insight?

Consumers with different diets (vegan, organic, ethical, religion, health and even sports related diets) as such products might be more expensive and hard to find. Consumer segments with lower income, especially dense student campuses around certain grocery shops and markets constitute natural growth seedbed in scaling our service, especially as the users in such segments are more open minded to tech based social media and consumer services.

The Story

The Idea was moulded already back in 2001, as Ville made a working DINK-shopping list on WAP and bought a barcode scanner at home and even started a research plan about it, in the University of Helsinki. However, mobiles at that time were not handy enough and fixed Internet connections were expensive. The idea was re-accelerated further at Univ. of Helsinki's Bioeconomy Bootcamp 2016, and the code & team has been continuously developed further after that. The name Kitsain - a Finnish superlative meaning most frugal person or process - was selected in the bootcamp as well.

As tech obstacles are now history, there is a reasonable chance to penetrate in the households with this concept. Also the climate change is in the minds of parents and young people more than in 2000. We believe the Idea of Lean Consuming could spread via hacker ethics kind of approach. Meaning some or all of the architecture could be Open Source, to activate early adopters, hackers and enthusiasts.

Also, we might not want to join in with big corporations in retail, like Hiku.us concept tried with Walmart, as we don't want to reduce consumer's possibilities or competition between retailers. Actually, quite the opposite: Ultimately forming a movement in Social Media to tackle food waste and take some power back from the big retailer corporations who have power also to the producers.

We have built an MVP, which has and will have more similar features as cooklist.co does. Our Hack The Crisis concept consists the most important use cases. In later phases, Kitsain will have marketing connections and API's straight to the producers as well, enabling Lean delivery and production for Local Food as well.

We are not a company - at least yet - and for a reason, as we want to test our idea as lean and as frugal way as possible to ensure e.g. traction and scalability of our services, including hardware solutions.