Aussies love to support their fellow Australians. With the eventful year that was 2020 and as we move through 2021, that support is growing.
Strayan is my attempt at making a material impact to help Australians. This app is for those committed to buying Australian, and thus helps Aussie farmers, businesses and families.
The idea for an app that boiled down “Australian-ness” into a single score (as featured in our wombat logo) for the majority of products in Australia has been discussed at the family dinner table over the years, but COVID and a life changing event gave me the impetus to build it. Throughout the Melbourne lockdown I learnt how to build mobile apps - Strayan has been and is my complete focus. Along with my wife, father and a supportive family, we debated (argued!) about what was important and finally settled on a plan. We added information for hundreds of thousands of products and rethought the approach to common problems. The “Australian aisle” has been a frequent request by Aussie consumers over the years, but it's not as straight forward to implement as it seems. To address this, we built the Strayan Speedy Scanner (it's a barcode reader) to quickly give you the Strayan Score - effectively bringing the Australian aisle to you.
While “buy Australian” intiatives to date are very positive, I felt they didn't go far enough in their ease of use, transparency, inclusion, simplicity and impact. Strayan is designed to fill all of those gaps. It provides a score for all products, so it’s fair - and it’s free. There are some products for which our information is incomplete - we clearly identify these in the hope that more manufacturers will include this information in industry data sources in the future.
I'd personally love for everyone to go to their pantries and try out the Strayan Speedy Scanner on the products they have and see what their Strayan Score is - the results may surprise you.
At present, our database is focussed on Woolworths, Coles and to some extent IGA. We are aiming to add many more retailers including Aldi soon.
This is just the first stage of Strayan. We'll be bolstering our data and covering many more sectors, not just supermarkets. While we decided to start at scale with the big brands in big stores, small and local businesses are very much close to our hearts and we will focus on this in the near future. The Strayan app is free. If you decide to buy Strayan MAX, the premium version of Strayan for $12/year (only a dollar a month!), as well getting all the features (like MyScore, a personalised score according to your values) you'll be supporting these initiatives as we move the needle towards Australian makers in the most impactful ways we can devise.
I've put well over a thousand hours into Strayan - if it has prompted you to make an Australian purchase when faced with a choice, then all the work has been worth it! If you have any thoughts about Strayan, I'd love to hear them - please send me an email.
All the best to you and your families,
Alex.
