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A U of T-student-developed mobile application that suggests nearby grocery store deals won the $25,000 grand prize at Walmart Canada’s Green Student Challenge this week.

“All of the finalists were remarkably well prepared and their ideas were truly extraordinary and an inspiration to all those in attendance,” said Shelley Broader, president and CEO of Walmart Canada. “The winning team's idea for a revolutionary sustainable app was truly innovative, and we are proud to have played a role in facilitating the development of their idea.”

The winning student group, which included both graduate and undergraduate students, proposed EcoSense: a crowdsourced eco-shopping tool that offers personalized recommendations for green products and optimizes shopping routes so users can find all their groceries in one trip.

The app was developed by Michael Zhang, a third-year pharmacy student, Adam T. Wang, a fourth-year economics and history student, and Andrew Girgis, a Doctor of Pharmacy student, all of whom previously developed tech startups during their time at U of T.

EcoSense was their team's response to the Green Student Challenge search for a strong idea to help businesses become more sustainable while improving their financial bottom line. They competed against student groups from across the country and walked away with $25,000 in team winnings plus a $25,000 donation to the University of Toronto.

Challenge winner Adam T. Wang spoke with U of T News about his team's win.

How did you arrive at your concept for EcoSense?

There were a bunch of flyers on my porch and they were all wet and soggy and I had to throw them out. The idea started out as just digital flyers—which is basic and obvious. But no one would get an application just to look at digital flyers. So we asked, "How can we make it better? What can the cellphone do that the paper flyer can’t?" The fact that you can make sustainable changes, the fact that you can filter out your lifestyle preferences, the fact that you can track and sell analytics, the fact that you can really provide a brand new service to retailers as well as a brand new service to consumers and users... and, finally, it can be used to solicit progress and change.

It sounds like a valuable tool for shoppers, but what benefit does it provide to retailers?

We don’t just help the retailers, we help many suppliers as well. Currently, grocery stores and retailers are still really behind in terms of the way they advertise and the way they market and the strategies they use for finding more about who comes to their stores. Now, retailers send out 90% of their ads through paper flyers. But regardless of what the price of cucumbers are at a Walmart in Markham, you’re not going to go there if you live downtown. And with web ads—you can’t really have a banner saying, ‘Tomatoes!’ They could be anywhere. But because almost everyone has a smartphone now, and all smartphones have location tracking, we can program our application to download fliers for the stores near you. On top of that, because it takes your preferences into your profile, the store and retailer now knows who you are, say, a vegetarian who has job and is lactose intolerant, and that you prefer this brand of salad dressing and buy it every single week. Because supermarkets target whoever is near them, they need to know who’s coming into their store, so this app presents a huge new market for them. Currently, grocers have no way of finding that out besides surveys and at-the-door exit questions which, frankly, not many people do.

How much does the app tell a retailer about its customers?

Besides learning their location and previous purchases, the retailer also has a new way of promoting and testing out products, because the main page of our application is a recommended products list and we use it to program a thing called ‘adaptive learning’ which tracks your activity on a three-to-four day trend, as opposed to what most programs track right now, which is a yearly or monthly trend. That way we can know that if you suddenly switch from name-brand to no-name brand cereal, it could indicate that you’ve just lost your job, and the app will start recommending cheaper products. That’s something retailers need to know and like to know. No matter what the economy’s like, no matter what the recession’s like, people are going to have to eat, and there are so many ways this can help retailers get to those customers.

Why do you feel your idea took the grand prize?

Many of [the teams] had really good ideas. I think in terms of scaleability and ease of implementation, which where two major factors in the competition, we had the clear advantage. Being a tech startup, we don’t have long-term costs besides supporting a small team. There are no manufacturing costs, there’s no shipping. That’s the beauty of this industry, in that while there may be some initial charges in paying for developers, it’s easy to implement because everyone’s just so used to technology now.

What do you plan to do with the winnings?

The majority of the winnings will be spent reimbursing expenses already incurred throughout the development of this project. Plus a good share of it that we have set up for the purposes of further developing this app, marketing and other stuff we need to build a business.

What’s next for EcoSense?

We’re really thrilled to have won and we’re just looking forward to taking it to the next level. Right now, in the short term, within a couple of weeks we want to finalize our product at least for one platform. Having a fully functioning working model, we got some smaller grocers to test it out, but we want to get all the kinks and all the bugs out before we take it to the major retailers who can really make a difference. We’re thinking we’ll be ready to bring it to larger retailers by the end of second quarter—basically, after exams. We have to factor in that we’re still full-time students and we don’t want to sacrifice our school for the business, but at the same time we don’t want to lose sight of where the business is going.