Eat Seafood Without Feeling Guilty with WWF Indonesia’s New BlackBerry App

Ever thought that the food on your plate could put the environment in danger? Now you can have some peace of mind with your piece of cuttlefish thanks to this new app. Created by the World Wildlife Fund Indonesia, it’s a pocketable guide for seafood lovers to help them pick the best seafood to consume without risking its population – so you can enjoy meals with pleasure, not a guilty pleasure.

It’s just like the WWF pocket-size print guide that was made in 2011, but now it’s in digital form as a BlackBerry app called Seafood Guide for BlackBerry. It supports the Indonesian language and is adapted to threats that lurk in local food – just as the WWF did for Hong Kong and other places last year.

It’s an obvious choice to pick BlackBerry OS as the Indonesian platform for this campaign. According to Growth for Knowledge (GfK), BlackBerry’s market share was 53.5 percent in June 2012 in Indonesia’s smartphone market. IDC forecast has stated that three million units of BlackBerry will be shipped to the country by 2012 and climb to eight million by 2015. WWF Indonesia predicted that there are 3.5 milion BlackBerry registered users in Indonesia. This is a niche market for the NGO activists.

WWF Indonesia wants to use this base as their target for ongoing social marketing and education about environmentally friendly seafood.

The Seafood Guide BlackBerry app gives you access to every type of edible sea species. The “Best Choice” label means you can consume it without a doubt as fish stocks are plentiful and sustainable. “Consider” means you might want to ethically think again. “Avoid” means the population of the species had decreased drastically, so it’d be wise to look for other options on the menu. Each category marks with green, yellow, and red to make it visually easy too.

This app can recommend places too. It finds the nearest restaurant in your location that serves renewable sources of seafood. If you are a culinary explorer, you can submit information about restaurants that provide these kinds of seafood. To make it even more fun, you can use this app as a sort of seafood cookbook and even upload your favourite recipes to share with other users.

The marine program director of WWF Indonesia, Wawan Ridwan, said that the Seafood Guide app is about changing consumption patterns. They’re also working on a local Android version of this app.

BlackBerry users can download this application directly or by searching for “seafood guide” in BlackBerry App World. This app is for free.