Rethinking an application against food waste and pro sustainability
Concept study for a start up.
Would you pay a package of biscuits the regular price if it was to expire tomorrow?
This is the question that the founder of MyFoody asked himself a few years ago. He answered by creating a service for supermarkets to manage food waste by pushing notifications to users through the dedicated app whenever a product is close to its expiring date and sold for half the price.
This was back in late 2015, when a bunch of other startups dealing with food waste were created in Italy, in the wave of EXPO’s slogan “Nourishing the planet”, with great focus on resources and sustainability.
Almost all of these services failed to scale. I was very interested in the topic and wanted to know why.
Discovering the problem
I had a meeting with MyFoody team, who’s been extremely supportive and helpful.
On this first meeting I have refined their business model canvas, stakeholders map, touchpoints, journey (with Service Safari method) and interaction map.
From the meeting, I realized that great consideration was taken into the value for the supermarkets (paying customer) and into the technical realisation and future development, but little consideration was taken into the end user. (Do they need the service? What problems do they want to solve?)
RESEARCH
I decided that my aim would be to understand who are the end users and analyse their experience.
I conducted 10 interviews and observations in supermarkets, 4 wallraffing (undercover) interviews to supermarket staff and sent a survey to the existent MyFoody users through MyFoody’s facebook page.
The goals with this research were:
1) To know better potential users and their habits regarding grocery shopping, discounts and about the use of app for discounts.
2) Understanding if potential users would use the service.
3) Understanding the motivations for using the service.
4) Understanding how shoppers behave in the store and their needs.
5) Probe knowledge about food waste and sustainable food.
The target for the service was pretty vague, “25–35 years old urban dwellers”, so I visited both regular supermarkets, organic supermarkets and supermarkets that already adhered to MyFoody’s offering.
This is what I have found:
MAJOR PAIN POINTS
- Lack of capillarity: MyFoody has developed a database integration management, but not all supermarkets are able to use this technology. Due to offerings being updated mostly manually by supermarket’s staff, partners drop off and offering databases display wrong quantity and products.
Shoppers have their habits when it comes to where to buy groceries.They usually do it close to home or close to work. They would not go 3 o 4 km to buy a package of biscuits for half the price. - Little planning of grocery shopping. Shoppers only partially plan their groceries. They mostly improvise in store how to fill their basket, so it’s highly unlikely that they would use an app to plan their grocery shopping.
- Lack of awareness and coordination for food waste management in Supermarkets. Supermarkets have very different policies when it comes to food waste. They find their own internal ways of discounting products, that they market directly to recurrent clients in store.
Also, shoppers don’t associate food waste with supermarket’s responsibilities.
This results in poor usage of the service MyFoody. Both the survey and interviews with supermarket staff showed that the app is not very often used to buy groceries for half the price (only 33% claimed they used it a several times a month, while 50% claimed they never use the app).
A new service is coming up: new things to discover
MyFoody team is already aware of some of the above mentioned issues, and it already has a plan on how to deal with database integration problems and capillarity. Plus, they decided to narrow their target users.
They are about to launch a service that gives the users points when they buy a MyFoody promoted sustainable product in supermarkets. When you gather enough points, you get to win a bonus, that you can mostly use to buy products (or win sustainable experiences through contests).
The journey is similar to the previous service, only now the purchase is registered through scanning of the receipt.
The food waste service would still be present in the same shape as now.
My concern, at this point, was to understand better the new target group of users, “25–40 years old urban dwellers embracing a sustainable lifestyle with a strong bias in purchasing sustainable products and experiences”.
I planned to probe the attitude towards this type of service and, starting from the research output, design a concept that would fit the users needs and desires and integrate it with the two services offered by MyFoody.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
This time I focused my research on interviewing and sending survey to very targeted people, that I have met in organic supermarkets and on online communities. I have analysed answers from 44 users and dug deep into 2 observatories about Italians’ sustainability concerns and habits.
I have created 3 personas defining their habits, needs, desires and attitude towards food waste and MyFoody’s new service (still to be launched, as I mentioned above).
I found that only 40% of the people interviewed were totally in favor of the new service. The remaining 60% was either sceptical or not in favor of it.
BARRIERS AND PAIN POINTS
The barriers and pain points towards the new service are:
1. “Higher purpose, not points!” This target’s major drive is ethical, not economical. Many are not used to or don’t like to collect points.
2. “Don’t complicate my shopping experience!” Apps for grocery shopping are not much used, since the process tends to be more spontaneous than meticulously planned.
3. “Don’t push me to consume more!” Tying the reward to buy new products and consume more is seen as inconsistent to the sustainable promise.
4. “Give me more information!” There is not enough information about how sustainable the products are and why (neither in labels or inside supermarkets).
5. “Food waste, say what?” Even sustainability aware people are not informed enough about how supermarkets deal with food waste and how consumers can positively contribute diminishing it.
MyFoody Redesign Concept
In short, I discovered that people within that target group would like to have more guidance about products and that their health and environment concerns are bigger motivation than money reward. In fact, when asked about wished features for MyFoody’s new service, this is what they answered:
After more studies and benchmark, I decided it was fully possible, sensible and economically sustainable to rethink MyFoody according to the users wishes.
So I started to rethink the new service shifting focus from products and discount to awareness and collaboration.
The concept is based on a service that rewards ethical lifestyle and guides the users to an aware sustainable food purchase, in collaboration with likeminded people, supermarkets and food producers, while engaging them in sustainability initiatives.
THE CONCEPT EXPLAINED WITH MOCKUPS
To consolidate the concept, I gave shape to an app that would have the following features:
- Sustainability guide
The product pages should display the sustainability ranking according to different parameters:
- Organic
- Chemistry used
- Packaging
- Fair
- Local
- Appreciation from peers
The average ranking divided by environmental and health concerns should be visible already at first glance of the product page. To do this, MyFoody could collaborate with an independent association (which they have already started to look into).
It should also be possible to chat with the producers directly on the product pages.
2. Tracking users’ sustainability
Recording purchases (with MyFoody’s new scanning feature), makes it possible for the user to monitor his/her own behaviour about sustainable purchases, healthy purchases and purchases to diminish food waste.
3. Chat to enhance information and collaboration
From the interview’s answers, I discovered that the main source of information to purchase sustainable products is peer to peer.
It would be a good integration to create a community inside the app, that could tip each other on products, environmental concerns, lifestyle inspiration and such.
It should be possible to:
- Inherit own contacts from social networks and phone
- Search for new contacts inside the app
- Invite new people to join
4. Support projects and campaigns
As this particular type of user’s motivation are ethical ones, MyFoody should make it possible to use bonus points to finance sustainable projects or information campaigns.
This will also increase MyFoody’s visibility, partnerships and chances to be financed.
When it comes to campaigns, these could also be organized and promoted by the users themselves, that will also have the possibility to invite people outside the app, thus spreading the message and the service.
5. Food waste awareness
To succeed with the food waste service, more awareness is needed. This could be done inside the app with dedicated information pages, video recipes, suggestions from experts (involving also supermarket staff to strengthen the large distribution/customer bond and create higher trust).
Evaluation
The feedback of the solution has been very positive both from MyFoody team and people embracing a sustainable lifestyle.
This solution would represent the first guide for sustainable purchases in wide collaboration between large distribution, producers and experts (in Italy at least).
It should be co-designed with partners and users, of course.
All the partnerships would obviously not be there at first launch, because these processes take time, but if you design to scale it should be fairly easy to onboard new producers, supermarkets and associations with time.
One critique has been that I put too many features in the concept. Especially the chat was regarded as redundant. I could agree to a certain extent, but I believe creating a collaborative community within the service would be helpful to both partners and users, by strengthening a sense of belonging. Also, broad social networks are on a dead-end when it comes to engagement, so it would be wise to create a thriving tribe within a sustainable movement that is easily connected with producers, experts and associations in the same platform.
Aspects to consider
The value for all parts is considerably increased if you compare with the existing MyFoody service with my concept (below a sum of given value).
Although, as I concentrated my project work on the end user’s needs and wishes, I did leave out other aspects to consider.
What I would start to do before and under the co-design sessions, is to understand the implications of:
- Payment inside the app and bonus to use as payment.
Would the associations think it is a good solution to dislocate payment to their causes? How would MyFoody account the bonus premium and deliver payments to the associations? - Can we quantify food producers extra effort to deliver detailed information about their products? Would visibility and trust be an enough ROI?
- Who will verify and judge the real sustainability and use of chemistry of the products? A partnership with an institution is needed and could give the new service a high status, convincing also food producers to join and make the effort.
- How do we integrate sustainable product communication already present in MyFoody’s partners (supermarkets) within the new service? MyFoody would need to be a consolidated channel for these supermarkets and food producers marketing plans. A good balance would be needed between information and advertising.
