Impact investing for social change with the new SMASH app

In my mind, the model is demonstrating other things too.

First, it has a positive take on the challenge. The big retailers have a surprisingly broad range of lower fat, salt and sugar items, but these are rarely the snacks or meals that kids are incentivised to buy. At the same time, new restrictions to fast food advertising mean that businesses need to innovate around putting healthier options in the spotlight.

It’s an obvious point but we need to give as much attention to promoting better options as we do to removing worse ones.

Second, the 20% discount offered by SMASH could be replicated through taxes, for example a reduction in VAT for healthier products.

Informing policy without politics 

If you were to approach that top-down, from government, it could take years. You can imagine the deeply political debate about VAT reductions, all of it based on competing views of how people might behave, rather than how they actually do. And the nature of that dynamic tends towards the status quo.

Here we’ll have real-world data of whether this idea works or not. In effect, using a commercial investment as a pathfinder for public policy change.

All of which is to say that impact investing for systems change doesn’t have to mean engaging the whole system at once. That can feel an unachievably high bar. Rather, it can also mean spotting where opportunities converge – and getting going.