Ross-on-Wye based charity, the Marine Conservation Society has picked up a prestigious Gold London Design Award for its Good Fish Guide app.

The Good Fish Guide app aims to help consumers make environmentally sound seafood choices by listing fish alongside their MCS Fish to Eat or Fish to Avoid rating – red, green or amber (eat only occasionally).

With funding from the UK’s largest food and support services firm, Compass Group UK and Ireland, MCS, which is based in Ross-onWye, worked with Brighton-based, Brightec, a mobile app development company to build a version of their web based and paper pocket guide.

The brief was to create an App that would help customers make informed decisions when choosing fish at a restaurant, or at the fish counter in the local supermarket. The App would need to interact with a large and complex dataset but still look like a simple, user-friendly, ethical ‘pocket guide’ consumer app

The App uses a simple traffic light system providing users with an at-a-glance guide to which fish species are at risk and should be avoided - based on present fish sustainability. Diners can also find restaurants that claim to have great sustainable credentials on an easy to use map where MCS reveals what they think about the eatery’s sustainability along with a rating from Fish2fork, the sustainable seafood restaurant ratings website.

The Good Fish Guide App is free on both iphone and android at www.goodfishguide.org