Updating the Firmware on Human Habits
Can technology help us decide what’s for dinner?
Like many San Francisco based millennials, I was invited to try a week of free meal kits via a local venture-subsidized meal startup. My friend had been using the service successfully for the past month to simplify meal planning when her boyfriend decided to crash at her tiny studio apartment. He was quickly becoming a pro at deciphering the meal cards and timing. And most importantly, the meal kit program solved every domestic couple’s daily struggle: deciding what’s for dinner.
Instead of caving and ordering delivery because you haven’t gone grocery shopping, you’re faced with making time to be home because you have forgotten to cancel the week’s food delivery. Your present-self can save your future-self from the escalating guilt of eventually having to throw away the organic, sustainably farmed ingredients that slowly stink up your fridge.
People have been debating what to eat since humans first started warehousing food. Suffice to say, in the plentiful absence of scarcity, we’ve kicked the tires on what we should eat and why. And yet, while we all know what to eat, and would rather have a home cooked meal than takeout, when faced with breaking out of the rut, our autopilot tendencies take over.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
— Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules”
In the last five years, over 150 meal kit companies have come into existence. Each meal kit service has its own spin and is equipped with travel-sized versions of all you need to pull together diet-of-your-choice fare. These companies have seen quick widespread adoption, and also the most churn. On average, only 10% of customers remain after six months of using a meal kit service. The proof here is in their diving share prices—Blue Apron IPO’d last summer at $10/share and as of the publishing of this post, it’s $1.88.
From a product design perspective, meal kit companies have a lot of user-flows and important touch points to consider. From website on-ramping to email reminders and smooth payment funnels, there’s a lot of stuff you could make. As a design strategist, I’ve notice that with all this stuff, the larger problems have been ignored. And without designing for the whole problem, no amount of small optimizations will magically push a product to arrive at its goals.
Do the benefits outweigh the cost?
Everyday we perform a quick cost benefit analysis at every decision point:
8a—Ride my bike or take the bus?
8:22—Eat the donuts at work or pick up a smoothie?
9:05—Meet my deadline or go to the meeting?
12:05—Pickup something quick to eat, or take a walk and eat a salad?
And that’s all before lunch.
No amount of delightful UI or guilt-inducing email copy will cancel out this mental math. It’s hardwired. It’s no wonder that deciding what’s for dinner is so difficult. By the time we reach 7:00PM most adults have made thousands of decisions. We get decision fatigue. By dinner time, all self-control has been drained from our systems. We make decisions to avoid making more decisions; all that’s left is habit.
Meal kit companies aim to alleviate the burden of decision-making by simplifying meal-planning for the week to a menu of entrees. Fundamentally, they’re trying to ease users into a new habit in which you subscribe and use their service for weeknight meals. That’s the business case that has to work for them to survive. That’s the bet these companies are making merely by existing.
If you’ve been invited to the service by a friend, the math is easy. Nothing beats free. In fact, the $60–80/week subscription fee for two people makes free feel that much better.
A service needed is always worth more than a service delivered.
—Ron Baker “Implementing Value Pricing”
Once you’ve gotten something for free, it’s tough to want to pay for it. Meal kit companies have dodged the bullet when it comes to a customer’s price resistance ($60 a week!? are you crazy!?), only to exchange it for payment resistance down the road, in most cases just one week later. They’re borrowing from software pricing, hoping to see exponential adoption of their service by softening the cost upfront. But food is not enterprise software that stakeholders have to socialize internally and slowly build adoption of to get a budget. And delivering food to someone’s door at a competitive rate is not easy or cheap. A meal kit company can’t just expand to the cloud when things take off.
For a business to not just launch, but thrive—a sustainable exchange of value must develop over time. The only reason anyone gives something in any transaction, is because they get something in return. This exchange of value constitutes the basic premise required to build and sustain a business.
All too often, companies over-estimate the business value of customers’ brand awareness and try to compensate for value with superficial design. They treat the fundamental exchange of value that should be the basis for their business as a feature they may stumble over while burning venture cash on user experience and making their software product shiny enough to draw an audience.
Lessons from the MRE’s of times past
The meal kit companies of the past began with the supply chain problem at face value. The ingredients had long shelf lives, came in a box or can. The costs of raw materials were insanely low. The difficult problem was shifting societal values.
These companies tackled the “dinner is difficult” space by starting with dessert. And they understood their customers! Cake-in-a-box companies introduced adding an egg to the mix to decrease 1950s house wives’ guilt around not spending enough time in the kitchen. These companies were trying to force a new habit by building on rituals their customers already had. Ad agencies of the time kicked in to improve the perception around Depression era look-and-feel, resulting in such dazzling packages as the My-T-Fine I remember stockpiling our kitchen pantry with.
The future millennials want?
A few days into my meal kit trial, I realized that the kitchen techniques and recipe cards that have been around for generations had been specifically redesigned for the selfie generation (mine). There’s nothing new to hiding vegetables in mac and cheese except that the technique was taught to me by a recipe card companion in lieu of a family friend or relative.
My mother learned to make my dad’s favorite chocolate pudding from her mother-in-law (the secret was adding condensed milk). My great-grandmother taught her mother how to reverse engineer Scandinavian cuisine. And here I stood, holding a carefully designed meal card that a team of professionals had no doubt usability tested extensively for my benefit. I was the end of the line. No additional humans required.
Fundamentally, meal kit companies — like all new technology products — require a change in behavior from their customers to be successful. Meal kits are trying to take it even one step further. They’re not just trying to get customers to change, they need to successfully shift a bad habit into a good one.
If human habits were as ripe for optimization as subroutines within an algorithm, then I think these companies would be successful. They’re attempting to upgrade the firmware on our lazy tendencies by taking away some of the time-intensive steps. But in truth, they’ve only changed up the incentives, like a pile of unwanted peas. The guilt remains. Creating products that change habits permanently requires looking at the system as a whole and the role of real needs and emotions within it. Instead of masking guilt with novelty, technology should serve our better selves sustainably.
Thanks to Erika Hall, Mike Monteiro, and Zack McCune.
