CITEOScore: incentives for lower-impact shopping
The brief
Citeo asked our studio to explore the future of the physical supermarket aisle as retailers introduce lower-packaging, refill, and reuse options across food, cosmetics, hygiene, and cleaning products.
We began with how a supermarket decision is made: where people shop, what recyclable and reusable mean to them, and how price, convenience, and loyalty programmes shape the choice.
How were shoppers already responding to lower-waste options, and what might encourage them to choose those options more often?
Talking to shoppers
We ran 15 public intercept conversations with 16 people over two rounds.
In April, we spoke with nine people across eight conversations in the Jardin des Tuileries. In May, we spoke with seven people across seven conversations in a shopping centre.
The first round was broad, covering store choice, packaging habits, and reusable containers. What we heard prompted a more focused second round about retailer accounts, digital catalogues, loyalty points, and what shoppers considered a useful reward.
Emilie Assante, Anniina Suhonen, and I reviewed the transcripts together and used the recurring themes to develop three concept directions.
What shaped the choice
The interviews did not reveal a single kind of sustainable shopper. People balanced environmental intentions against the price, effort, and routines of a real shopping trip.
Convenience and routine set the baseline
Participants often chose stores because they were close, familiar, or easy to fit into an existing routine. One called proximity his only criterion. Reuse options had to work within that routine to stand a chance of adoption.
Price made some environmental habits stick
Several participants connected reusable bags, waste reduction, and discounted surplus food with saving money. One described carrying his own bags after retailers began charging for them, and keeping one in his pocket. This gave us a reason to explore incentives. It also gave us a rule: the reward had to have a value people could understand at the moment of choice.
Reusable packaging lacked a shared meaning
People could often name recyclable materials, but reusable packaging was harder to define and less visible in daily shopping. Some reached for egg cartons or jam jars. Hygiene, storage, and the effort of remembering containers added friction.
Packaging also communicated quality
Two participants described responding to how a package looks. One volunteered that she is « très sensible malgré moi au packaging », sensitive to packaging despite herself. Another said she ignores it on products she buys regularly but looks closely when trying something new. Reducing material therefore raised a design problem beyond waste: how might a lower-impact product stay legible and appealing at the shelf?
Loyalty systems already occupied too much space
Participants described accumulating retailer cards and apps with little commitment to any of them. One agreed to an account whenever a cashier offered it, because it was free and might become useful later. We took this as a reason to avoid proposing a standalone sustainability app, and to ask instead whether an existing loyalty account could carry an environmental incentive.
Choosing the loyalty programme
After the first round, we explored three directions: supporting reusable-container habits, reducing friction around bulk purchasing, and working through retailer loyalty systems.
We treated loyalty as a design hypothesis rather than a finding. It could attach a concrete reward to a routine shoppers already understood, which felt especially relevant when participants described price as part of their environmental choices. It also avoided adding another account to the collection they already ignored.
Could a retailer’s existing loyalty programme reward lower-impact choices without requiring another account, another app, or another unfamiliar behaviour?
The CITEOScore proposal
CITEOScore proposed a 0 to 100 product-impact score at the shelf. Choosing higher-scoring products would earn Citeo points through retailer loyalty accounts. This linked environmental information to a visible benefit without adding another account.
Behind that experience, the proposed model grouped product information into four categories.
| Category | Proposed considerations |
|---|---|
| Packaging | Recyclability, biodegradability, recycled content, chemical composition |
| Logistics | Transport distance and carbon footprint |
| Production | Water use, energy use, and waste |
| Consumer use | Expected product lifespan |
The final presentation sketched a four-part method: collect product data, normalize each category to a 0 to 100 scale, apply weights, and calculate a total. We used the method to make the proposal concrete, not to claim a validated measurement standard.
We illustrated the intended behaviour with three bags of carrots. A lower-impact product could cost more at the shelf while returning more reward points. The example made the trade-off visible: a score explains the impact, but the points give that information a place in the purchase decision.
Making CITEOScore real
The proposed calculation made CITEOScore concrete, but it was not a validated measurement standard. Turning it into a working programme would require three practical decisions:
- Who supplies and verifies the product data, and who sets the category weights?
- Who funds the points, and what is the reward actually worth to a shopper?
- Where must the score and reward appear to affect a decision: at the shelf, at checkout, or later in an account?
Those decisions would shape how consistently the score could be calculated, whether the points felt worthwhile, and whether both appeared while shoppers were choosing.
Reflection
The interviews showed that sustainability rarely decides a purchase on its own. Price, convenience, and habit still matter. CITEOScore worked with those behaviours by putting a product-impact score and reward inside an existing loyalty programme.
Making it real would require decisions about how the score is calculated, what the points are worth, and where shoppers see both.