Same ingredients, different recipe

Sarah Karam
FOOD UPCYCLING
Published in
3 min readJun 19, 2017

The acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon and this piece in the Economist on Lidl’s entrance to the US grocery market has got me thinking a lot about the way we purchase food & drink. More specifically, the ways I’d love for it to change.

How far have we really come?

I used to love going to the grocery store as a kid and well into my adulthood. Browsing all the different products, learning about ingredients of various world cuisines, watching how the meat counter staff cut and cleaned chicken like cleaver-ed ninjas. Observing my mom pick up and smell dozens of fruits & vegetables before finding the perfect tasty gems. I suspect many a budding amateur cook cultivated their love of food in those trips to local supermarkets as children.

But in the last few years, as farmer’s markets have grown in supply and scale, as mobile commerce has outpaced physical retail innovation, the supermarket has lost its freshness. Why buy five pounds of flour, together with imported, unripe lemons when you can buy packaged items online and buy produce elsewhere for cheaper and better quality? Grocery shopping in a store has become a chore. And for suppliers and grocers, the inefficiencies of warehousing 10s of 1000s of products, training 1000s of employees, and trying to keep up with technological change are daunting challenges. A 2017 study by Acosta showed that 80% of US grocery shoppers read labels for nutritional value. Yet there is no way to search or browse according to this information (!).

The US has added ~300 Farmers Markets every year

Amazon and a MIT professor have invested in designing the supermarket of the future with Amazon Go and the Coop in Milan. But what if the supermarket of the future wasn’t a supermarket at all? What if companies shift the paradigm from walking the aisles in search of hard-to-find information, to taste-testing centers, more akin to an Apple Store than a Safeway. What if you could taste an egg at your local pub and purchase a dozen from there? What if the neighbor in your town who grows the best tomatoes had incentives and infrastructure to supply them for the whole block?

Quick & dirty ideas:

  • Most CPGs are repeat, low-elasticity, purchases and don’t require physical “shopping”. If you could shop these goods from your home with a visual of what’s available, wouldn’t you?
  • Imagine if you could query a database of products based on nutritional goals or needs? E.g. vegan breakfast items, baby-friendly produce, anti-carcinogenic foods etc. and get a return of the top items for you?
  • Most of the goods we purchase don’t enable touching/tasting/testing. What if every restaurant became a sample store? Every retailer a sample distributer?
  • Produce is supplied and savored locally and the rise of farmer’s markets are proof of that; enable neighborhood markets where locals can share their grains and spices with the neighbors. Provide incentives for residents to grow and share fruits and vegetables (and local info so you know what’s growing and what to grow).

Rethinking food shopping doesn’t just have the potential to produce a more delightful consumer experience; we need to enable more efficient market economies, reduce food waste, and improve overall nutrition. Food shopping should trigger the same excitement and fulfillment as a trip to the toy store for kids or a trip to the mall for teenagers. After all, you have all the ingredients to make it so. We just need to use them differently.

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Sarah Karam
FOOD UPCYCLING

Home is where the cast iron pan is. Bay Area via Beirut, London, and New York. Currently @ Google.