Action Against Hunger is a non-profit organization committed to ending world hunger. As their yearly fundraising event was cancelled, due to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which landed when the event was due to proceed, they were confronted with a huge loss in possible donations. We came up with a solution to make people donate to help restore the food balance in the world, and to make up for the donations they didn’t get due to Hurricane Sandy.

Our goal was to help Action Against Hunger receive the needed funds, but also boost their image and establish them as one of the key organizations fighting hunger in the world. So we created the Give Your Calories app, an app that lets you scan food via image recognition or barcode recognition, and automatically calculates and converts these calorific values into dollar values, which you can then choose to be donated in the app to do your bit for restoring the world’s food balance.

The software recognizes certain items like barcodes, logo’s and packages and presets the amount of calories for recognized items. Users can also select from an auto-suggested list. There are several types of donations, all linked to the number of calories. The checkout happens via PayPal. The app serves both as a means to generate direct funds, but also as a PR-tool for Action Against Hunger. Thanks to a custom made spreading and seeding plan, the app travelled the world and made sure Action Against Hunger is now a top of mind NGO.

"Give Your Calories" was launched via postering, a tutorial video spread across social networks as well as a major partnership deal with the number one online cooking show, Epic Meal Time. An episode of Epic Meal Time had the app completely incorporated in it, as the main characters used the app, and explained what it was all about.

Across social networks, a tutorial was spread and on instagram, the place where people most share photos of their food, a tracking system was devised, following #calories #food and several other relevant key words. When a user posted a photo and added one of these hashtags, they would be followed by the account GiveYourCalories, where there was just one photo. A call to action to download the app.

Please check the link below for up to date results. http://kuotzu-i.net/GiveYourCalories/Design/