Dr Darling, who lives near Cromwell, is the co-founder of Sumfood, which was established to drive a rethink of the food ecosystem with a vision of achieving integrity of food supply chains.
It aimed to provide information, knowledge and resources to consumers, and share that information with producers to enable them to make better choices and prevent food waste and illness.
Its consumer facing brand FoodTruths simplified and made reporting food issues easier for consumers by triaging reports, providing guidance to consumers, and telling them who and how to notify the correct agency.
Over the last two years, there had been 1500 reports received, ranging from a tail in a spread through to stuffing falling out of ravioli, Dr Darling said.
Now FoodSpies was being launched, an app which would let consumers know where to go for the cheapest groceries, using crowd-sourced data to put the buying power back in the hands of consumers.
Launching on December 1, the app will allow consumers to log their supermarket shop, including adding how many people they were shopping for and how many days it was for.
It would inform the average price of that shop for supermarkets within a practical radius of where they lived.
Dr Darling said she was confident consumers would embrace the app, and indications from early consumer research was that people would input data.
She was excited about the app launch, and there had been a "massive" shift away from consumers having any voice.
It was "just adding another bit of power back to [them]".
Working with sister company InstatData, verified reports from consumers with large datasets from other sources could be used to understand food issues in real time, improving outcomes for consumers and protecting brand integrity and customer satisfaction for producers.
An "amazing" team of people had been working on the app; it was about small steps to get it up and running and the next release would be comparisons between online and in-store shopping.
Dr Darling, who was the founding chief executive of Oritain — the company which pioneered commercial food origin systems — and operates an orchard with her husband Mike, said consumers needed to be listened to and producers needed to be helped out.
It was exciting to be doing something that was going to have value for the general population and hopefully drive "a bit of reflection" within the supermarket sector.
Sumfood’s model was developed and trialled in New Zealand to go offshore but that was derailed by Covid-19.
It would happen at some stage, as it was a model that could be scaled easily, and there was not the population in New Zealand to sustain it, she said.
