Lean Canvas Analysis 2: Food Inventory & Alert System

Our second proposed solution to the food waste problem space is a Food Inventory & Alert System. Its purpose is to identify food in the fridge that is about to rot and notify the consumer ahead of time to prevent food waste through an app. Furthermore, this app would automatically generate meal plans based on food in the fridge. The corresponding Lean Canvas can be found below.

Problem to Solve

The driving logic behind the solution is this: we believe that by increasing the awareness of at-home food inventory, home cooks and the environmentally-conscious will be better suited to plan and create meals more efficiently, while reducing food waste at the same time.

Customer Need

The customer need for this product is the same as the need identified in our first LeanStack analysis because the target market is the same. Environmentally conscious consumers will be most likely to purchase this product because they believe in supporting a greater cause. Similarly, because this product would help people save money over time, this product will appeal to more financially aware people. Thus, thinking from the perspective of our target customer base, we arrive at the same statement for the thought process of the ideal customer:

As an environmentally-conscious consumer, I want to reduce the amount of food I am throwing away to reduce my ecological footprint and the amount of money I am wasting on excess food.

For more detail, refer to Lean Canvas Analysis 1.

What value can we offer to the customer?

After determining the consumer need, we identified the value we can offer consumers through our product. By combining the food inventory and tracking app with our food documenting technology, we can offer cooks and the eco-conscious recipe ideas and meal planning allowing for an easier time creating home-cooked meals and managing their home food inventory. By providing this feature to customers instead of only marketing the technology as a food waste tracker or reducer, customers will have a personal gain from the technology in addition to being able to reduce food waste.

The high-level concept that we seek to execute is to bring commercial/industry food inventory tracking to the consumer household to reduce food waste and mismanagement. This core feature would be implemented by a dual hardware & software solution. This system would involve a camera in the fridge that can track food items and their expiration dates as well as a connected app that serves as the user’s access point to the food tracking information collected by the camera.

This core system (camera & app) would be accompanied by convenience-oriented features in the app such as recipe suggestions and/or meal planning to provide a food hub app for home cooks that they can rely on for all their food planning & managing needs.

Riskiest assumptions

In pursuing this solution, we are making a few key assumptions regarding the feasibility and viability of this product. The top three riskiest assumptions are listed below:

1. A single, well-positioned camera along with an algorithm can determine different food types within a fridge.
2. I cook enough meals at home that this system would help me stay organized, but I also need more recipes to use the food supplies I have.
3. I will use the food that I have not yet used within my home to create new recipes that I may or may not like.

Possible experiments

To determine whether or not these assumptions fail, and consequently, if we need to alter the course of our solution, we have designed several experiments to carry out in the future.

1. The linking of hardware and software is highly technical. To explore the possibility of developing a system like this, we can interview professors researching object recognition. In the same way, we can contact start-ups that have developed/are developing similar or related products. To test whether or not it is possible for a single camera to accurately identify different food items and track their stay in the fridge, we can test camera angles on refrigerators currently on the market. If we fail to find a single angle where the camera can see the majority of food in the fridge, we may need to look into using multiple and/or focus on smaller fridges. It is most ideal to develop and perform tests on the MVP. Without tests, it is hard to know how effective it can be since there will likely be items blocking each other from view with no good angle for the camera to see the entire fridge.
2. To test market interest for this sort of solution, we need to conduct market research. Surveys questioning our target market for their willingness to buy this sort of system could shed light on the demand available in the market. This experiment should be carried out first to decide if this direction is worth pursuing.
3. This assumption of whether a consumer will be willing to follow suggested recipes can also be answered through market research in the form of surveys. In addition to surveying people about whether or not they use surplus food to cook new recipes, we can conduct an observational study where each member of the house marks down whether or not they choose to throw a perishable away or to fit it into a recipe each time the situation occurs.

These are all important experiments we plan to carry out in the next semester to determine if the Food Inventory & Alert System is a viable solution for downstream food waste.