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A common misconception is that products that feature a barcode that start with 93 are Australian Made. This is not the case - the 93 prefix means the barcode was issued in Australia. Any company can buy an Australian issued barcode and sell products via it, regardless of the individual products origin.
Strayan goes a level deeper when ascertaining the nationality of the company that sells a product. We ascertain the legal owner of the barcode and from there look up it's corporate structure to understand where it is domiciled, including any corporate parents the company may have.
We have good coverage across major and minor supermarkets, for all categories they sell. To be more specific:
Woolworths: Excellent. Coverage across almost all items stocked at Woolworths.
Coles: Excellent. Coverage across almost all items stocked at Coles.
Metcash (IGA, Foodland, Campbells, Mitre 10, etc): Good. Coverage across most external brands, but some own and internal brands missing.
Aldi: Limited. As Aldi's barcodes are proprietary, we don't have them at this point. We will be attempting to add Aldi's range in Q2 2021.
Costco: Limited. As above with Aldi, Costco's products are mostly proprietary. Again, we hope to add these in Q2 2021.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at gday@strayan.net.au
By subscribing to Strayan MAX, the premium version of Strayan, you enable:
If there is information missing, generally the vendor of the product has not included information to product data companies who we purchase product data from. But each of ingredients, made and owned have their own wrinkles - if information is missing on:
Ingredients: Generally the vendor has not provided an Australian ingredient percentage, or has not included key words in the product description that we can use to ascertain the ingredient source. As it stands in early 2021, 47% of supermarket products (generally food items, but this also includes non-perishables/homewares) in our database include the Australian content percentage. Sometimes we can find it on the labelling, but many products (local and foreign) do not provide it and therefore score zero for this metric and are provided a provisional overall score (see below).
Made: This can usually be found in source data, or within text describing the product. As of early 2021, 87% of products in Strayan have made information, either specified directly or extracted from the package labelling. That said, there's challenges here also - some packaging includes words as “produced” and “packed” which could be ambiguous*.*
Ownership: Since it is generally not included in product data, Strayan sources the legal owner of the barcode and corporate structure from various reliable sources. We have ownership data for 90% of products listed in Strayan, the remainder that is missing means we could not ascertain a clear legal entity for ownership (including corporate parent, if any) for the particular product.
When information is missing or obscure,( eg. “made from local and imported ingredients”) the product is not given any points for that metric and the entire product is given a provisional Strayan score (denoted by a “?” next to the score). In an ideal world, we hope that this will influence more vendors to include this data in standard industry datasets that we use, to benefit all.
However, an ideal world would be nice but may not be enough, so in the coming weeks we will be releasing a feature to allow users to submit information to overlay on top of our base product information.
We built the Strayan app with the singular goal of encouraging Australians buying more Australian products.
This directly and indirectly benefits all Australians. We decided to build the Strayan app to let Aussies know about the origins of a product so they can make informed buying choices - we believe this will materially move the needle towards improving the outcomes for Australian farmers, businesses and families.
Strayan Scoring
For official Strayan scores, colours range from orange (zero) through yellow to green (perfect score) to give a visual cue. Some scores with a “?” after the score are provisional, as we have insufficient data to give it an official score.
MyScore
In addition to the above, if you decide to create your own scoring metrics you can nominate countries to be “unfavourable”. This then colour codes the score grey, denoting that this product does not meet your personal criteria.
By subscribing to Strayan MAX you can customise the metrics to reflect your preferences and values by creating an account within the app and from the main menu > Customise MyScore.
This will allow you to add a MyScore - a score tailored to you, calculated to your personal metrics and you will be able to toggle between the Strayan score and MyScore.
Strayan does not purport to judge the “Australian-ness” of products - there is no pass or fail mark.
In some cases the result may merely provide a means of comparison, and a low score may even be a consequence of unavoidable circumstances, such as the ingredients not being available in Australia.
In fact Australian content of the same product can vary from season to season. We present the information as simply as possible and leave it to you to decide.
Short answer: We're not there yet, but we're working hard to add all products and increase accuracy of the data within the Australian market.
Long answer: While we have 224,910 products in the Strayan database, there's still millions more products out there that we may not have. We take data accuracy seriously, and do all we can to ensure data is as accurate as possible.
The vast majority of information in Strayan is collated from manufacturers and retailers themselves. The “base” product information layer is purchased from a company called GS1, who administer and maintain standards for barcodes globally. Manufacturers and retailers are responsible to keep their own records up to date in the database which is updated weekly to thousands of retailers including well known Australian supermarkets. If the Australian ingredient content percentage is missing in Strayan, it's generally because the manufacturer has not included it in the data it has provided to GS1. If they do decide to include it, the Strayan app is updated weekly with new data and at that point the product will be updated in Strayan to reflect the correct information, direct from the manufacturer.
If the Australian content is unspecified it would score zero for the ingredients component of the Strayan score which is worth 50% of the total score. We hope that the Strayan app may have some impact in encouraging companies to list their Australian content within the GS1 dataset that is shared with thousands of businesses locally and globally, to benefit all.
While GS1 has millions of products in its database, it doesn't have every product or all information needed to generate a Strayan score. This is where the additional data layers come into play.
Additional product data is overlaid on top of the base layer data, increasing the breadth and accuracy of products listed. This comes from varied and multiple sources.
This layer enriches the base and additional product layer data with information such as legal owner of the product, corporate parents (if any) and where they are domiciled, category information, etc. which is needed to generate a complete Strayan score.
We have so far analysed over 220,000+ supermarket products and applied a score out of 100, calculated by rating 3 elements.
Based on our research we have applied the following weightings to each
The Strayan score is very simple by design. As an example, if 50% (50 * 0.5 = 25) of the ingredients are Australian, the product is made (produced or processed) in Australia (100 * .3 = 30) and the brand is owned by a foreign company (0 * 0.2 = 0), the Strayan score would be 55.
If you don't agree with these weightings, by subscribing to Strayan MAX you can create a MyScore: a bespoke score to customised to your own values.
At the moment you cannot add a product. We are working on this and hope to release this Q2 2021, at which point we hope many people will be uploading any products we have missing from the Strayan database.