A transparent values layer in agentic commerce
What Carob Is
Carob is a cultural and technical layer designed for a world where algorithms increasingly decide what is seen, trusted, and recommended.
We create a standardized Values & Impact Layer that allows
businesses to express what they support, how they contribute, and
where their communities lie—through structured, verifiable signals
that both people and AI systems can understand.
Instead of relying on branding, storytelling, or blind
trust, Carob makes values machine-readable and publicly visible.
Every commitment is encoded. Every flow is traceable. Every impact
is documented
What We Do
We Circulate Value
We standardize how commitments — causes supported, contributions routed, communities served — expressed as structured, machine-readable data. Consistently, not episodically.
We Make Impact Verifiable
Every contribution becomes a permanent public receipt — traceable end to end, recorded publicly, built on visibility rather than promises.
We Preserve Human Meaning
By making values legible to both people and AI systems, Carob ensures solidarity stays visible as commerce becomes increasingly automated — supporting the communities making commerce possible
How It Works
Building Together: Steps to Solidarity
Merchants
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01
Connect Your Store
Install Carob on your Shopify store. Define your commitments through the Values & Impact Layer — causes you support, contribution rates, communities you serve. Structured, machine-readable, public from day one.
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02
Your Customers Are Already Signalling
Shoppers have been using Carob's chatbot to route contributions toward causes — on your products, before you joined. We bring you the record: which causes your customers chose, how much they routed, how long they've been doing it. Not a pitch. Evidence.
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03
Signals Become Real Flows
Once you're on the rails, shopper round-ups become verified merchant contributions — routed to vetted community organisations, confirmed in permanent public receipts. What was given, to whom, when. The chatbot signal turns into actual impact.
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04
The Record Compounds
Every contribution adds to your public ledger. Discoverable by shoppers. Readable by systems. The more you commit, the more legible you become — not through promises, but through a visible, growing record of what you've actually done.
Shoppers
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01
The Signal Enters the Record
Shoppers signal what they'd want their favourite brands to do — choosing a cause, routing a small amount, putting their name in the public ledger. No merchant has agreed yet. The demand is documented before the supply responds.
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02
Values Become Legible
Signals accumulate into structured, machine-readable data — a picture of what people actually want from commerce, recorded in behaviour rather than stated in a survey. Readable by people. Readable by systems.
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03
Merchants Encode Their Commitments
Merchants define clear, public values commitments — causes supported, contribution rates, communities served — through Carob's Values & Impact Layer. The signal that started the loop now has a response.
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04
Contributions Flow, Impact is Documented
Every contribution routes through Carob's public ledger to vetted community organisations — recorded, traceable, and visible without relying on blind trust. Each one generates a permanent public receipt: what was given, to whom, when. The record compounds. Discoverability and trust build over time, through visibility rather than promises.
Our Approach
By the People, For the People
Change does not happen through good intentions alone. It happens when systems are designed to make values visible, enforceable, and repeatable. Carob replaces opaque giving models with a glass-box approach, where commitments are encoded, flows are public, and impact can be verified by anyone.
Our approach is grounded in a simple belief: value should circulate back to the communities that make markets possible. Solidarity should not exist as an aesthetic or occasional gesture, but as part of the infrastructure itself — culture built into the way commerce operates.
Communities are not asked to believe in the system. They can see it working.
Benefits
Everyone has a role. Everyone benefits. Three stakeholders. One circulation loop.
Responsibility:
Circulate value back — because every brand is built on communities, ecosystems, and labour that deserve reinvestment. Not as a campaign. As a habit.
What you gain:
Trust that compounds over time. Differentiation that doesn't depend on discounting. A verifiable record that makes your values legible to customers and to the AI systems that increasingly decide visibility, ranking, and trust — without relying on branding, storytelling, or paid reach.
Responsibility:
Signal what you care about. Choose brands whose claims you can actually verify. Your purchasing decisions are a form of civic participation — and now they leave a record.
What you gain:
Impact that doesn't require extra effort. A permanent public receipt showing what your purchase supported. Every values-aligned action becomes a structured signal that influences how systems rank and recommend — restoring agency in automated commerce.
Responsibility:
Do the work. Maintain the accountability standards that make your participation in the network credible. Show up consistently so the record means something.
What you gain:
Steadier, more predictable support — routed through a public ledger and fair distribution logic, based on need rather than visibility or popularity. Less administrative burden. Every contribution is traceable and documented. More energy for the mission.
A Note from the Founder
“Culture is repeated public behavior. Commerce is the most repeated public behavior in the world. Carob is infrastructure for the culture that commerce can build - and a new commerce that culture can build”
Christina - Founder