Apps help Danes boycott American goods amid Greenland dispute with U.S.
Consumer apps aimed at helping shoppers identify and boycott American goods surged in Denmark after a diplomatic crisis over Greenland, app creators said Monday, as some residents looked for practical ways to translate political tensions into purchasing choices.
Ian Rosenfeldt, who created the “Made O’Meter” app, said he saw a surge of interest in Denmark and elsewhere after the recent flare-up in U.S. President Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland. He said “Made O’Meter,” a free app that uses a phone camera and barcode scanning, recorded about 30,000 downloads in just three days in late January at the height of the trans-Atlantic dispute, out of more than 100,000 downloads since the app launched in March.
Rosenfeldt said he built the app after joining a Facebook group of Danes who wanted to boycott U.S. goods. He described frustration among participants who could not reliably tell whether items on shelves were American-made or not, adding that without knowing that information, customers cannot make what he called a “conscious choice.” He said the latest version uses artificial intelligence to identify and analyze several products at a time and then recommend similar European-made alternatives, with user-set preferences such as “No USA-owned brands” or “Only EU-based brands.”
Rosenfeldt told The Associated Press during a demonstration at a Copenhagen grocery store that the app is designed to give shoppers information they can use to make decisions. He said the app claims “over 95% accuracy,” and he described the process as taking an image of a product and then using the technology to find relevant information about the product in multiple layers.
He said downloads for “Made O’Meter” initially rose when the app launched but later tailed off. He pointed to last month’s uptick in attention, when Trump stepped up his rhetoric about the U.S. needing to acquire Greenland—a strategically important, mineral-rich Arctic island that is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. Rosenfeldt said usage peaked Jan. 23, when there were nearly 40,000 scans in a single day, compared with about 500 a day during last summer, though he said scans have eased since. He said there were still around 5,000 scans a day this week and that “Made O’Meter” is used by more than 20,000 people in Denmark and by people in other countries including Germany, Spain and Italy, and as far as Venezuela.
Rosenfeldt said the experience had become “much more personal,” saying it felt like “losing an ally and a friend.” He added that while he does not expect the boycotts to damage the U.S. economy, he wants the campaign to send a message to supermarkets and encourage greater reliance on European producers.
He tied that hope to the sequence of U.S.-Denmark developments. Trump announced in January that he would impose new tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries that opposed his calls for a takeover of Greenland, but he then abruptly dropped the threats after saying a “framework” for a deal over access to mineral-rich Greenland was reached with the help of NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. Rosenfeldt said few details about the agreement have emerged. He also noted that the U.S. began technical talks in late January to craft an Arctic security deal with Denmark and Greenland, which the territories have said sovereignty is not negotiable.
A separate Danish app, “NonUSA,” also gained momentum during the same period. One of its creators, 21-year-old Jonas Pipper, said the app topped 100,000 downloads at the beginning of February and cited more than 25,000 downloads on Jan. 21, when he said 526 product scans were performed in a minute. Pipper said that of the users, about 46,000 were in Denmark and around 10,000 in Germany.
Both creators suggested that the apps gave users a sense of control amid the political dispute. Pipper said some users told him the pressure had lifted and that they “gained the power back in this situation.” But economist Christina Gravert, an associate professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen, questioned how much practical effect a consumer boycott could have, saying there are actually few U.S. products on Danish grocery shelves—around 1% to 3%.
Gravert said that even though U.S. goods are limited in stores, American technology remains widely used in Denmark, from Apple iPhones to Microsoft Office tools. She said shoppers who want impact should focus on where U.S. companies are more entrenched. She also said boycott campaigns are usually short-lived and that real change often requires organized collective action rather than individual consumers, though she noted that large supermarket brands could respond if consumers stop buying particular products.
On a recent morning outside a Copenhagen grocery store, some shoppers described boycotting as partly symbolic. Morten Nielsen, 68, a retired navy officer, said he boycotts but does not know all American goods, so his efforts are “mostly the well-known trademarks.” Another shopper, 63-year-old retiree Charlotte Fuglsang, said she likes America and does not think people should “protest that way.”