I wanted to share something that I’m hoping will help me when it comes to making better choices about what I buy. While this isn't about promoting European products in the first instance, it's designed to help me figure out which brands I currently use, but may need to avoid, so I can find better alternatives that are local, European, allied countries, or even values-led US brands if no other option exists.

Here's what I did:

Got the idea from Reddit: I saw a post on Reddit with a visual of all the brands owned by big multinational companies. Really helpful to see the visual but there were literally thousands, and I wanted a text list I could feed into an AI chat as a reference document.
Did Some Research: I looked up these multinational companies on Wikipedia which seemed to have a relatively updated list of subsidiary brands, focusing on the parent companies I wanted to steer clear of, like PepsiCo, Nestle etc.
Cleaned Up the List: I used AI tool to organise everything into a neat PDF.
Made It Easy to Use for me with AI: I added the PDF to a chat in Mistral so I can quickly check any products I see in my fridge or cupboard. The AI helps me spot any brands I should avoid. I can also just list the brands off using voice for ease/speed but accuracy suffers a bit. I may also be able to just take a picture but haven’t tried that yet.

The image is the output.

Anybody with access to a simple list and an LLM could do this. Been inspired by the excellent websites and resources others have made and posted here, which I will use to find alternatives - but I first needed to know where the problems were!

Im hoping this will make it easier to buy stuff that aligns with my values. Hope this makes sense and helps someone else too!

all 42 comments

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[–] synicalx@lemm.ee 5 points 57 minutes ago

Why not just ctrl-f the PDF?

[–] OrlandoDoom@feddit.uk 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

With AI, it might randomly forget stuff that is on the list, and it might randomly add to the list. Personally I wouldn't rely on it

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

that's an unlikely fear. Retrieval-augmented generation is pretty good these these days especially for simple prompts like this.

[–] Symphonic@lemmy.world 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

That's pretty neat! While I see the concern of not using AI for everything. These projects are good for practice and provide motivation. This in turn gives a sense of achievement and maybe lead to bigger things. That to me makes this worth it. Great job.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 8 hours ago

Thank you

[–] inamorta345@lemmy.ml 86 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (4 children)

The sentiment is great, but I really wish people would stop using AI for everything.

No matter your opinion about AI in general, which I'll admit, I'm not a fan of, there is a true environmental cost associated with it, and using it for such trivial tasks is not such a great idea.

Edit: wording and format

[–] rooroo@feddit.org 3 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Also, which AI is this? If people use ChatGPT to avoid evil companies I don’t know how to help them

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 1 hour ago

Yes Mistral. Not too sure about the brand other than they are French, so chose over OpenAI.

Ultimate aim is to host my own local small model on phone or home server, but not quite there yet. Could then use for this and other purposes.

[–] inamorta345@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 hours ago

It's Mistral Le Chat. I don't know enough about Mistral tbh though

[–] fuzzyspudkiss@midwest.social 16 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

While I agree the environmental impact of LLM is concerning, I disagree that this is a poor use for it.

It's pretty much the best case scenario for using an LLM. There are so many companies within companies that if you're trying to avoid an umbrella brand an LLM can quickly parse through that data and provide a response. Whereas you may take 5 minutes trying to find an answer and if you're grocery shopping that could add up very quickly.

And this is trivial for an LLM to do and would use barely any compute. As always, companies that are using AI to generate images, replace staff and moderate their websites that are going to be creating 99% of the environment damage by AI. We shouldn't be going after individuals who are using it to make their day-to-day easier especially if they're using it to hurt monopolies.

[–] inamorta345@lemmy.ml 7 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understand correctly from the steps provided, it was manual data extraction.

AI was used to "organize data into a neat PDF", and to later ask the AI whether a brand is okay to use or not, with a PDF that presumably contains "a list of brands to avoid" according to the prompt. This can literally be a Ctrl+f or something similar.

I'm not going after anyone. Yes, we should be going after corporations, and not only for their environmental footprint, this doesn't mean we can't criticize other people.

Plus, I really agree with the sentiment, as already stated. But, imo, this is not the right way to go.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

May help if I clarify. The document is ingested into the chat, so acts as a local knowledge base. When I put some random brands into the llm it uses the info from the doc to respond.

I probably could manually search the document (ctrl-f), just find it easier to use the llm approach, especially if inputting in an unstructured/messy way.

[–] Renohren@lemmy.today 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Does the llm search itself for subsidiaries of the brands on the PDF on the net? Because it could then be a good use of AI to find the one you stumble upon in the millions of brands big players have participation in...

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 2 points 11 hours ago

not deliberately, however when run it did automatically identify a brand (Hellman’s) owned by a multinational NOT in the list (Unilever). I hadn’t included Unilever in the source doc as it is British/Dutch. So it must have used its own knowledge base.

Perhaps it interpreted my preference as wishing to avoid multinationals? This is what it output:

“Based on the list you provided and the document, here are the brands you should avoid if you are following the list:

Doritos: Owned by PepsiCo.
Tropicana: Owned by PepsiCo.
Mentos: Owned by Perfetti Van Melle, not listed in your document, but worth noting.
Hellmann's: Owned by Unilever, not listed in your document, but worth noting.

The other brands you mentioned are not listed in the document as brands to avoid. However, it's always good to double-check with the latest information or packaging details, as brand ownership can change.”

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Can't you just search the pdf instead

[–] derpgon@programming.dev 1 points 22 minutes ago (1 children)

Are you a bot? You literally replied to a comment mentioning that umbrella corps are hard to find and requires a few minutes of searching, whereas an LLM already knows it.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 1 points 4 minutes ago* (last edited 3 minutes ago)

I mean that's true, but in this case, the OP downloaded a pdf with all the brands and umbrellas they wanted to avoid and gave it to the LLM.

I agree that an AI could be more intuitive and easy to use.

My point i guess is this is not something an AI just solves on its own and that you couldn't solve without an AI

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 0 points 11 hours ago

yes you probably could just search ctrl+f. I'm quite lazy so imagined that if I could upload the document (46 pages PDF of companies and their brands), I could then just chat with the bot/or perhaps take a picture of a fridge/products and it could quickly give me the answer.

[–] DioEgizio@lemm.ee 14 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah don't get me wrong I use AI too when I need to get something done quickly but for things like that you can just search in the pdf

[–] misterdoctor@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago

I think the benefit of AI here is that it can tell OP that Doritos is owned by PepsiCo. So, doing a ctrl-f for Doritos may not turn up results in the PDF. Using AI here would be to identify sub-brands that you might not even know were associated with a larger umbrella brand.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Important perspective. Admittedly I use AI all the time for work so using it in other areas has become second nature (for bettter or worse!)

[–] BroBot9000@lemmy.world 13 points 14 hours ago

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf

[–] VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like having a csv (or any table) and searching that would have the same result, work offline, and be much less computationally intensive?

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

You'd need a list of every single product and brand that you want to avoid these companies own thousands of brands.

[–] Zeppo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

How do you think the so-called AI learns that information?

[–] VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

From what op wrote, they have a list of brand names they wants to avoid. Asking about doritos, and searching for it in a table, would have about the same result from that starting point.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

From their other comment, they only have a list of main corporations.

[–] VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 9 hours ago

https://feddit.uk/comment/15726732

They copied the list of brands owned by each of those conglomerates from Wikipedia.

[–] jlow@beehaw.org 7 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Can you post the PDF, please? As others have said I'd never use AI for ethical and environmental reasons but I'd love to be able to look up which brands to avoid.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

not sure how to upload PDFs, sorry.

Edit: turns out I can’t upload PDFs to lemmy.

If you wanted to make a list yourself it’s a bit of a hassle but not too hard, I just searched for the Wikipedia pages for each of the following companies, type in something like “List of brands for [company name]”. The companies I picked were:

General Mills
The Coca-Cola Company
Mondelez International
Mars
Procter & Gamble (P&G)
PepsiCo
Nestlé (not a US company, but have avoided for years)

Once you have the page you can just select the list directly from the page, copy, and then paste into a text doc or something. You could then search from it, and add to it as well. It may be a bit untidy, but search should still work.

Hope that helps, and sorry I couldn’t share the document directly and save you the hassle.

[–] VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

There's lots of diiferent file hosts for exactly this purpose. I'm partial to this one: https://catbox.moe/

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 4 points 9 hours ago

Thank you for that. I thought it would be blocked where I live, but seems to work.

Here is a link to the source document

https://files.catbox.moe/jtmcb5.pdf

[–] Zeppo@sh.itjust.works 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

OK so here are some brands butter kiss twinning English breakfast tea Hovis seed sensations KP peanuts tonics, caramel wafers Mentos pure chewing gum Tropicana juice after eight mince Doritos mild salsa Hellmann's mayonnaise Hellmans mustard Rubicon sparkling mango Vera Moretti, innocent

Seems like more commas would help it interpret this list.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 5 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Agreed. I was speaking into the phone while looking in the cupboard, and this was how it recorded it.

[–] Zeppo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

You could edit it before sending it. Seems like you’re putting a lot of faith in AI for some reason.

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 1 points 8 hours ago

Yes, the screenshot was the first time I used it. Will know to edit in future

[–] VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I used to use dragon when I got tired of typing sometimes, so now I gotta stop myself from saying all the punctuation in my sentences out loud.

But maybe try that, a lot of dictation software recognises it.

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Twinings English Tea should be avoided because it’s dogshit. Buy English English Tea. Nobody else seems to get it right.

[–] MurrayL@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Twinings is English.

(But if you want actual great tea, get Yorkshire Gold.)

[–] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I don't get it. You're making fun of the person using the spicy word predictor, right?

[–] Mobster@feddit.uk 4 points 13 hours ago

Sorry, I’m not familiar with the reference.