FEEDBACK: A Platform for Reducing Food Waste
A two-week design sprint extravaganza
Team Members: 11
Time Frame: 2 weeks
Goal: To reduce food waste
Secret Weapons: Agile, Scrum, Dry-erase markers, Coffee
This is my account of how 11 people used a two-week design sprint to come up with a vision to reduce food waste.
The Start
Food waste is a very real, very human problem. We know that we do it, but perhaps it’s become too ingrained to realize the extent of how much food we actually waste. Some countries like France and Italy have taken action and made it illegal for food retailers to throw food out. Retailers pay a fine for throwing edible food away instead of donating it to those experiencing hunger. Here in Toronto (and the rest of Canada) no such laws exist, but the existence of organizations like Second Harvest are enough to inform the extent of our food waste problem.
It was time to fight back against food waste and address hunger in our city.
In our team of 11, I played the role of the researcher of non-profit organizations that deal with food rescue, as well as a member of the prototyping team.
Research and Insights
We started our research in 3 teams, each researching a relevent segment of the food value chain, 1)consumers, 2)producers and 3)organizations. We started asking questions like who is wasting the most food? which segment do we focus on? For my team there were interviews conducted with small businesses and with Second Harvest as well as lots of domain research and reading of online studies of food waste in Canada and other countries.
In our research, we found that Second Harvest are the real superheroes of the current food waste narrative in Toronto. They rescue food surplus from around the city and redistribute it to non-profits that help those experiencing hunger and those needing food assistance. Through an interview I conducted with a local food bin delivery business, I found out that they set aside surplus food for Second Harvest every week, but that Second Harvest doesn’t always come to get it because they already have too many pickups. Not only that, but there is no way for them to know whether or not the food would be picked up by Second Harvest. This was also echoed in an interview with Second Harvest when they said that surplus food exists and the need for food security is growing, but that the resources and infrastructure to rescue and redistribute food were spread thin. This lead to smaller-scale, but still impactful donations getting lost in the process.
What if we could find a way to include those small-scale donors and connect them directly with agencies and those who rely on food donations?
The Opportunity
We needed to create a tool to instantly connect those wanting to donate surplus food directly with non profit agencies. The donated food items would then be made easily available to those needing food assistance. It would be a platform for multiple devices that would make donating, scheduling pickups and accessing food easy and rewarding for everyone involved. With Second Harvest’s current operation not being able to accomidate consumer and small scale donations, it made sense to start there.
The research teams found that there were 2 important groups of people in our food waste paradigm: those that have too much choice and generate food waste, and those that don’t have access to food in the first place.
We began to read the writing on the wall:
What’s in our name?
I came up with a name for our vision, FEEDBACK. My thinking was that the concept of feedback is taking something that already exists and building upon it — creating a continuous cycle of change and improvement. It plays with the idea that an output of surplus food can be rerouted as an input for addressing hunger, creating an ongoing feedback loop. Not to mention the relationship between food and “feed”.
The logo my team members created reflects our vision that giving and receiving healthy food should be simple, rewarding and make everyone involved happy.
How we were going to make FEEDBACK happen
We divided ourselves into new groups based on the UX design phases: 1)Planning, 2)Design, and 3)Prototyping. We each answered new questions that arose from our tasks at hand. As we acquired answers, research and new information, we passed on the information to our scrum board and fellow team members, which looked something like this:
We decided to focus on small-scale businesses as our primary donor persona, since they had the most donations that were getting left behind. We defined our primary spectrum of users as “donors, nonprofits, drivers and diners”. The fastest way to connect these users is through making instant connections using smartphone applications, since 68% of Canadians now have a smartphone. Being able to donate food and receive food at the tap of a button from anywhere is important for businesses and non profits that are already busy with their day-to-day operations. Our platform would also include a simple, easy to use dashboard for non profits and Second Harvest to keep track of the donation journey and inventory.
With our first leg in motion, our sprint needed some clear goals and core features in sight. My prototyping team came up with some user goal and core feature alignment:
Goals
Donor
Reducing their contribution to food waste while making an investment in their community
Non Profit
Acquiring nutrient-rich food donations and making it accessible to those experiencing hunger
Diner
Being able to access healthy affordable food
Second Harvest
Overseeing the operations of vetted agencies rescuing surplus food and feeding those experiencing hunger
Core Features
•The activities of drivers, donors and nonprofit agencies will be synced and accessible in real-time.
•Donors will be able to donate their surplus food conviently through the app.
•Drivers will be able to use location mapping system to see where the food are and where it needs to go. They will also be able to communicate inside the app.
•Nonprofit agencies will be able to keep track their inventory as well as the flow of incoming and outgoing food.
•Diners will be able to see what food is available to them in their feed and locate a nearby agency.
With these established, we determined the users preferred tech format, which then informed our design and prototype choices:
The Design
Simple, beautiful, easy-to-use. Our design team took the complex process of filling out a dispatch form for a donation and made it easy, descriptive and efficient. They visualized and simplified the managing and transportation of donations for non profits. And finally, they created a dignified experience for diners needing food assistance to locate and access healthy food.
High Fidelity Prototype in InVision
Check out the design and functionality of our mobile app with our clickable prototypes:
Donor user flow
Diner user flow
Most of the pain points we had were with time. If we had more time, I would have liked us to explore a user flow for the drivers to view and manage their donation pickups, as well as be able to communicate with donors. An in-app mapping feature of donations available for pickup, almost like an Uber pickup functionality would have been interesting to explore in the design and prototype phase. However, this will be something for future development!
The Finish
A sprint, by definition, is “a way of quickly reaching a target or goal”. We rose to the challenge of coming up with a solution for reducing food waste and addressing hunger, but we didn’t stop there, we found some extra endurance for future endeavors. We developed a scalable roadmap for FEEDBACK, always moving forward with expansion while improving features:
This roadmap is featured in the proposal I wrote for Second Harvest:
We proceeded to end our sprint on a keynote presentation. We presented our vision of FEEDBACK to Second Harvest and our peers. They were grateful and impressed with our hard work. Our vision aligned with Second Harvest’s goals, but in ways they hadn’t imagined yet, with the addition of a mobile app to make donating and accessing food even easier and more streamlined. It felt great to be able to present a concept that will be helping an organization who are already working hard on the front lines of reducing food waste.
The design sprint may have only lasted two weeks, but our vision for FEEDBACK was to create lasting change for the long run. I couldn’t be more proud to be able to work with Second Harvest, The Walmart Foundation and our interface design partners at MetaLab to help make FEEDBACK a reality.
