(Bloomberg) — Vegemite, the yeasty spread from Australia, gets a passing green checkmark. So does a French bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. But Diet Coke, a favorite of President Donald Trump? To that, a popular new mobile app in Denmark assigns a failing red X — a message to shoppers to put that American stuff back on the shelf.
Denmark, a country one-sixteenth the size of Texas, is tired of feeling pushed around. So Danes are turning to mobile apps to scan everyday products and boycott those associated with the US.
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Since Trump began threatening to grab Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, downloads of such apps have exploded. The most popular — (Danish for ) — is now the No. 1 free-to-download application in Apple’s App Store in Denmark, after seeing a sudden surge in recent weeks.
Jonas Pipper, the 21-year-old who co-created the app with an old school friend, calls it a “weapon in the trade war for consumers.” And the fact that it’s empowering regular Danes to send a signal to the US is “pretty cool,” he says.
With all of roughly 6 million people and a total economy that’s about the size of Maryland’s, Denmark isn’t about to leave a dent in US exports. But the sudden popularity of (sometimes called ) and a similar app, , underscores how the Trump administration’s approach has unsettled, insulted and infuriated many people across Europe.
Even the far-right, anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, which has in the past sought closer ties with Trump, lashed out at his rhetoric around Greenland. “Let me put this in words you might understand, Mr. President: f*ck off,” Anders Vistisen, one of the party’s lawmakers, said in a speech to the European Parliament on Jan. 21. (He was promptly reprimanded for breaching the chamber’s rules on the use of profanity.)
Institutional investors in Denmark are also starting to turn their backs on the US. On Jan. 20, AkademikerPension told Bloomberg it was exiting its entire holding of US government bonds. Though the fund’s sale was tiny – it held just $100 million in US Treasuries at the end of December — the symbolism of the move drew global attention. Treasury yields rose on the news, and Trump has since threatened “big retaliation” against anyone dumping US assets in response to his policies.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed suggestions that Europe collectively might take an approach in the financial markets. In response to AkademikerPension’s decision, Bessent said bluntly:
“Denmark’s investments in US Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant.”
Anders Schelde, chief investment officer of AkademikerPension, said the decision to sell was based on a whole array of issues spanning Greenland, the ostensible lack of US fiscal decline and a weak dollar. He also suggested that caution toward the US doesn’t begin and end with Trump.
“You cannot put the genie back into the bottle,” Schelde said. “Things might get better and more calm a few months down the road, and Trump, he can’t be reelected, and the next president might be somewhat different,” he said. “But what comes then in five, six, 10 years?”
In their own small way, Danish shoppers are now taking a similar approach. But boycotting US products – or even figuring out what does or doesn’t count as a US brand – can get complicated. For instance, Danish brewer Carlsberg A/S bottles and distributes Coca-Cola Co. products in Denmark.
And it’s not the first time consumers outside the US have sought to boycott American goods, including following Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, though the intensity and longevity of those movements varied over time.
For now, the Danish app is going strong. Pipper notes it’s being made available in several different languages, including German and English (and will soon be downloadable on Android phones). It’s even available in the US.
“So I don’t know if Trump has an iPhone,” Pipper said. “But he could use the app, if he wants to.”
–With assistance from Christian Wienberg and Christian Miller.
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