Foodzey — Jonathan Timma's Portfolio

The Problem

Food waste is a global problem. According to the USDA, 30-40 percent of our food supply ends up as waste. Food waste has social justice implications, wastes a lot of resources (energy sources, water, monetary etc.) and does not help climate change. Food waste generates a lot of CO2 and methane emissions.

The Goal

Foodzey’s goal is to get users to waste less of the they purchase. This is achieved through tracking food purchasing and waste behavior, tips for providing more effective means of preserving food, providing recipes to users for food that is about to expire, and providing visualizations to quantify waste.

Research

My team started off by defining our target audience, which was young professionals (not living with their parents), and recent graduates (not living with their parents). We decided on these populations and parameters because these populations are more likely to be more conscious of their finances and would likely waste less money. We recruited our participants from group member contacts as well as a listserv from the School of Information. Our participants are either single or have a partner that they cooked/ate meals with. In regards to the type of food spoiling, we focused on refrigerated foods because these foods typically do not have as long of a shelf life as those foods stored in pantries or cupboards.

My team wanted to learn the factors and reasons that lead to people wasting food. We created interview questions asking about our audience’s shopping behavior and how they manage their food when it is brought home. We asked about user’s shopping behavior because it is a known fact that grocery stores and supermarkets are designed to get customers to buy more. We wanted to see the effect of this phenomenon since the users don’t have control over the design of the store. The following sets of questions were asked:

· Do you make shopping lists? (If yes, do you stick to your list when shopping? If no, how do you decide what to purchase once you get in the store?)

· Are you aware of all the food that is in your refrigerator at the moment?

· Can you remember the last time you throw something away? Why did you throw it away? How did you feel about throwing it away?

· What are some of the grocery items that you usually almost always buy?

· From all of your grocery trips from within the past month, have you been able to finish these items or have you had to toss some of them away? (If no: Which items did you have trouble finishing before they began to spoil? What were some reasons why the food spoiled?)

Important findings from our research

Using our research questions, we learned the following:

· People do buy more things from grocery stores than anticipated and we do believe this is a problem for decent size of our user base.

· Participants do on occasion decide what to eat “on the spot” when they are in the grocery store.

· Some foods, including leftovers, end up in the back of the refrigerator where they aren’t readily visible. People thus forgot about them and they spoiled.

· Some fruits and vegetables don’t last long when refrigerated. Our participants were not able to get around to using them in time before they spoiled.

· Some participants plan out what meals they want to make before going to the grocery store again, but when the day comes to make a particular dish, they don’t feel “in the mood” for eating the dish or cooking it if it takes some preparation.

· Packaging is a big issue. For many participants, food items usually don’t come in a quantity that perfectly fits their consumption.

· Impromptu outings with friends usually end up causing participants to eat out and thus not use the food they had purchased.

· Users would like better ways to store their food and recipes to utilize the food they have.

Design

The goal of Foodzey is to get users to waste less of the they purchase. My team used a framework from Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The brain has two independent systems working simultaneously all the time. One is an emotional system (They use University of Virginia’s psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of an elephant) and one is a rational side (metaphorically called a rider). People like to think that our rational side is always in control (the rider controls the elephant), but change fails because our emotional side is strong (If the elephant disagrees with the rider, ultimately the elephant will win since it is the larger animal). In order to effectively create change, you have to appeal to both systems.

Utilizing this framework, we used expiration dates and recipes to “direct our rider” and personal finances and environmental sustainability to “motivate the elephant”.

Feature 1: Tracking shopping and waste habits

The first of Foodzey’s features is that it tracks your purchasing habits for a few weeks so the system knows what you typically purchase. This will allow users to better stay on track with what they need to buy and to try to limit some types of impulsive buying. Foodzey scans the user’s receipt and then upload all of the refrigerated items into the phone. Using data about the average shelf life of fruits, vegetables, and meat, Foodzy provides an approximate time as to when the newly bought food will expire. When the food is within 3 days of expiring, Foodzey will notify users that the food is close to expiring.

FEature 2: Storage Tip Provider

The second feature is a tip provider to provide a better means to store food. For example, if a user bought a sack of potatoes, one tip to keep them from molding is to take them out of the bag to allow for better ventilation. Better storing techniques will allow a user’s food to last longer.

Feature 3: Recipe Provider

The third feature of Foodzey is a recipe provider to help users use the food that is about to expire. The recipe provider analyzes the ingredients that are about to expire as well as the ingredients that the user already has in her/his refrigerator. This feature prevents users from having to go out and buy more food which may lead to further waste.

Feature 4: Visualization of Trends

The fourth and final feature of Foodzey is visualizations of their trends in wastage, how much money they wasted in food, and the meals they could have made with the wasted food. We debated about whether or not having a visualization for just the monetary waste would be sufficient in showing users exactly how much they were wasting. We collectively decided that for some users, a monetary visualization of waste was not enough to create behavior changes thus creating multiple visualizations of the different facets of waste.