Wakker Dier
A barcode scanner that tells you what the packaging won't.
Ninety percent of Dutch supermarket dairy carries no real animal welfare certification. Wakker Dier calls it sloopmelk. With Howdy Amsterdam, we built Wakker Dier's first app: scan a barcode, know instantly whether it's sloopmelk. We gave it an outspoken, activist style, in the visuals and in the audio. The app is not only functional. It takes a side, because Wakker Dier wants people to remember.
The idea
An app that carries the campaign and puts the choice in the shopper's hands.
Wakker Dier runs on posters, petitions and press releases. This app had to make the argument somewhere those don't reach: the shelf, in the three seconds a shopper has, where no one stops to read. For an NGO that meant a first app, and stepping into developer accounts and store reviews. Howdy Amsterdam led the campaign. We took the digital side: the people in the room who had built one before.
What we made
From a working build on a phone to a polished app in the store.
We didn't just describe the app, we built a working prototype early and put it in Wakker Dier's hands. For an organisation making its first app, that did what no deck could. The early build also surfaced the real constraints. There's barely any phone reception in Dutch supermarkets, so it had to be native: quick to open, scanning on device, no signal needed.
Every scan checks Questionmark's database, the independent watchdog that scores what is really behind a barcode. Barcode in, sloopmelk or not out.
The app is the centrepiece of the campaign. It couldn't just be functional, it had to look the part. We built on Wakker Dier's strong brand: black and white, high contrast, with a popping magenta. A real-time liquid simulation renders right on the phone and carries the transitions and the feel.
And the app speaks. Gerda Havertong, a Dutch television icon, is not only in the campaign video. She is in the app. Howdy shot her for the onboarding, so the ad and the app feel like one piece, and on every scan her voice calls the result. Not one recording on repeat but a range of lines that play at random. "Sloopmelk." And three scans later: "Ik zei toch: sloopmelk." It makes scanning fun enough to repeat, and maybe fun enough to change what ends up in the cart.
What we did
Number one in the App Store, and a shelf that got harder to ignore.
In a few months we built the app, designed the campaign visuals and made the App Store deadline. The work reached past the screen too: scannable posters that let a passer-by install and test on the spot, calling out the exact brands, plus digital out-of-home on the same animation as the TV spot.
An NGO app doesn't usually chart. This one hit number one for days and stayed in the top ten for weeks. The dairy shelf is still ninety percent sloopmelk. The scanner doesn't fix that. It makes the problem impossible to ignore the next time you reach for a carton.