Plant Jammer Markets

How might we use data and a user base of several hundred thousand to minimize food waste?

Plant Jammer is a danish scaleup company that specializes in using AI to generate unique food recipes, based on the stuff you have in your fridge.

Plant Jammer has amassed a user base of close to one million active users. They wanted to look into how they could use that as leverage to fight food waste. The final solution was a platform called Plant Jammer Markets, which could use local live data to tell grocery chains what consumers were looking for. The hypothesis was, that it enable grocery chains to be more proactive in putting products close to expiring on sale. The sales would then be pushed directly to consumers using the Plant Jammer app.

The challenge

A lot of stores end up throwing perfectly fine food and vegetables in the trash. Plant Jammer wanted to investigate how food stores could avoid food waste by tapping into Plant Jammers’ local communities in real-time. What if stores could tap directly into the ingredients of preferred recipes being cooked by their local communities?

A shared vision

Michael Haase, a former management consultant, the founder of the company, knew how important it was to make his team get a shared vision of what the final solution could look like, so he asked us to facilitate a one-day product definition sprint where we would start by creating a shared vision and then break it down into actionable bits and pieces that the dev-team could take and implement.

The development team gathers around a quick mock up of the solution made on post-it notes (Michael, the founder, in the middle).

We started out by running a vision exercise using LEGO bricks and asked our participants to build the main features of the products using whatever LEGO bricks they wanted. We did start a conversation about what each team member saw as the core feature.

One participant’s take on what the platform should be characterized by

Sketching

After we’ve discussed the vision we broke it down into smaller pieces that we could convert into features. Based on these features we started sketching out ideas on what the solution could look like.

Sketching out the solution on post-it notes. Quick and dirty.

Paper prototyping and testing

Since we only had a couple of hours we tested each other’s ideas by simply using marvel to make really rough low-fi prototypes

Super rough prototypes, but good enough to test the basic ideas

Based on quick feedback from each team member we created a storyboard based on selected ideas.

The final storyboard ready to be designed

Breaking down the solution

To help the development team we broke down the solution into core features, need-to-haves and nice-to-haves. We did this to create focus, so the dev team knew what to begin with.

Michael, the founder, making the final decision on what to focus on

Designing the Plant Jammer Market prototype

Based on the final storyboard we built wireframes and layered them with elements to represent Plant Jammers visual identity

Wireframes

Final solution and results

Speed and agility is important to a scale-up company. We spent 2 days in total going from rough vision to a concrete solution, that Michael, the founder, could use to pitch the idea to local grocery chains in Denmark.

Michael was really happy about the results.

Translation: REALLY AWESOME…

My Roles

• Product definition sprint facilitation
• Storyboarding
• Wireframing and prototyping
• Usability and user testing
• Reporting