Eat. Drink. Think
Service Design for food beverages: What we learnt in the SDD Session organized on 14th March 2021
Food is a basic need. The food and beverage industry is constantly improving to meet our demands. The food on your plate has a complete cycle which starts from our agricultural lands to our plates and a lot get dumped into our waste and completes the cycle of going back to our lands in the form of bio waste.
How are Service Designers contributing to this sector?
Making the most of the produce at every step of the cycle is a key role a Service Designer could play.
To further explore how service designers are contributing to this sector, SDD India invited Akanksha Gupta and Anirban Banerjee to share their experiences in the Food and Agri-tech sector.
The sessions were focused on completely two different examples of service and systems design thinking principles in building the following —
- Bread to Beer: A circular economy to manage food waste
- From farm to Fork: Largest rural digital infrastructure
1. Bread to Beer — A circular economy to manage food waste
IBRIDA a startup built from a clean slate by Akanksha Gupta and her friends from Politecnico di Milano to fight the wastage of excess bread produced in Italy by bakeries. A Team of Service designers concerned about food waste decided to give a second life to bread baked with a lot of passion by the local bakeries.
The journey sounds exciting and fun but had its share of failures and learning that brought this team of high “spirited” entrepreneurs to reach their goal towards sustainability and mission to manage food waste.
Test. Test. Test………..
The concept of Beer to Bread was tested with locals to understand their reaction and feedback. Testing and failing at a rapid pace is one of the most important processes to learn fast!
Their constant engagement and discussion with local bakeries and people gave the IBRIDA team confidence to scale up from home brewing to large scale production! Their systemic approach to economic development, lead to designing a regenerative process that benefited businesses, society, and the environment.
18000 bottles = 250 kg Bread saved!
“Service design was the backbone of the project “ — Akanksha Gupta.
She shares constantly that it was never about the product but more about the system behind the product. The team did not stop with the production of beer from bread. They continued exploring different aspects of sustainability. Their core lay in their approach to building a business around a circular economy.
This approach is clearly seen in their packaging, community engagement activities and their new perspective on the reuse of resources and the life cycle of ingredients.
Get to know more about their story here.
2. From Farm to Fork: Largest rural digital infrastructure
Discovering new services for an existing world’s largest rural digital infrastructure serving ~ 4 Million farmers across regions.
Anirban Banerjee shared his experience working in the Agri space and taking it to the next level by providing a holistic view of farming, understanding the complications, and finding ways to empower farmers to make their lives easy.
He along with his team of Service Designers and researchers spent time with the farmers to understand their limitations and pain points in order to build Agri-tech solutions for farming to improve the efficiency and profitability of agriculture.
The methodology that was adopted by his team was termed the 5Ps.
People | Products | Platforms | Processes | Partners
Through their research, they found that the majority of farmers use a smartphone. An agricultural app would be a smart move to help make their farming business more efficient.
The platform already supported some aspects of farming like cropping assistance, farmer’s community, e-commerce, etc, and the new services were focused on solving the labour-management and market pricing problems of the farmers.
The engagement looks at the nuances from the field research, ecosystem interactions, physical and digital touchpoints, key stakeholders in the system, possible solutions, and validation of the findings.
Debjani Ghosh, President NASSCOM, said: “India’s agriculture sector is advancing steadily towards digital transformation and the startup ecosystem is playing a critical role here, bringing innovation and disruption.
Service Designers will have a huge role to play in this sector because there are multiple touchpoints to orchestrate.
If you want to share your thoughts or chat about Service design, write to us at hello@servicedesignindia.com or connect with me (Juneza).
If you are new to Service Design and would like to explore the work scope for a Service Designer at a Startup, MNC or a Design Studio in India, check out my book Navigating Service Design.
We will be bringing more interesting sessions like this. Don’t miss out. Keep in touch through our Instagram, Linkedin & Website.
