11/19 — Fleshing Out Our Service

Prior to today’s meeting, we knew we wanted to do something involving food since the location of Mellon Square being in downtown, majority of the users come from surrounding commercial establishments in the lunch hours, either to eat their lunch or relax. So, we focussed on providing an opportunity to bond over food, but we we were yet to pin point exactly what this should be.

Some of the ideas we considered were:

• A training kitchen and cafe for students of The Art Institute of Pittsburgh to help train youths from less privileged backgrounds through a partnership with YouthPlaces — a community organization that works with teens to provide them with training opportunities. They held one event, called “Back Of House”, where the youths worked with local chefs to provide the catering for the evening. However, this was a one-off event. We hope to provide a more long term service. Plus, bringing in culinary school students would also provide them with the opportunity to gain real-world work experience.
• A space where local organizations from the diverse ethnic communities of Pittsburgh could serve their ethnic cuisines for a month. This was intended as a way to showcase and celebrate Pittsburgh’s diversity while providing lunch-goers in the downtown area with an interesting range of food options that keep varying.
• A food incubator for food entrepreneurs to test out their restaurant concepts — a mini Smallman Galley located at the heart of downtown Pittsburgh.
• A pop-up cafe that can be taken over by local vendors from the Strip District. Traffic to the Strip is relatively lower during the weekdays, so we thought they could benefit from the exposure of being centrally located with access to lunchtime crowds.

While these ideas seemed feasible, we still felt there was something missing. After further discussion on our target lunchtime, professional crowd, we came up with the idea of a shared kitchen.

Shared Kitchen

This was a space where busy working professionals in the downtown area around Mellon Square could go to whip up a quick lunch with the help of a well-stocked pantry and fully equipped kitchen. Here’s a snapshot of the idea and the challenge it seeks to address:

• While people are becoming increasingly health conscious, working professionals don’t always have the time to make a (healthy) lunch in the morning or the night before. As a result they tend to resort to buying their lunch from nearby vendors which is often unhealthy and expensive.
• What if they had a space that allows them to quickly make a salad, just like they would at home? Or, a wholesome rice bowl?
• The aim is to create a shared, communal kitchen that provides customers with basic ingredients and equipment to prepare a healthy meal for themselves during their lunch breaks.
• Partnering with local farms will allow us to source fresh produce.

Stakeholders & Value Exchanges

We began by identifying the various stakeholders that could be involved in this service as well as their needs and assets:

Stakeholders and their roles

Then, we created this value flow diagram to help us understand their relationships and the different exchanges that could take place between them:

Mapping stakeholders and value exchanges

Service Blueprint

We then began to imagine what a typical customer journey might look like when using the service and the various channels involved:

Service blueprint

One of the things we were toying with at this point was whether we needed a person to present in the space at all times or whether we could leave it up to technology to manage bookings, entry and exit, people’s use of the space, etc. However, we decided it was better to have at least one person there to oversee the use of the space, help customers if necessary and ensure everyone cleans up after themselves. This person would play the role of a host or facilities manager.

There were a lot of major questions that arose out of our discussion that needed to be resolved. We noted them down for our next meeting.