Problem

People want to reduce their household food waste, especially when it comes to hyper-perishables. These foods don’t come with storage instructions and typically go bad before expected.

Solution

A complete food waste reduction system that helps people store, track and use the food they buy in an effort to reduce waste. 

Insight

People need a resource that teaches them how to prepare and store perishable groceries because their biggest contributor of food waste is produce going bad before expected and they want to reduce their food waste so that they do not feel guilty.

User Research

When we first started diving into the idea of food waste we were not sure what we would find. However, after looking into it more we found that food waste is a huge issue and something that we felt we would be able to help with. We found in our initial desktop research that somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of food in the US ends up in the trash. Drilling down deeper, we found that at-home food waste is the most significant source, contributing to 43% of total food waste in America. Additionally, around 80% of people throw out perfectly good food because they misjudge its freshness or the time it takes to go bad.

We set out to see how many people thought that food issues were personal a problem that they deal with. To first tackle this we sent out a Google survey to do some quantitative research. We found that:

• 40% of people reported that they consider food waste a problem their household

• 56% of people reported that food goes bad faster than expect and that it is out of their control

• 64% of people wanted to learn ways that they can store food in order to make it stay fresh and last longer

Overall, the quantitative research revealed that there is a lack of knowledge around proper food storage and that people had an interest to learn more.

Definition And Synthesis

We then wanted to talk to people and see what their personal issues were. We did these interviews via Zoom and they yielded some very interesting results.

From there we created our persona, Molly, and we found that she has 4 key pain points related to food waste which are: 

• Food is out of sight and out of mind

• There is storage misinformation

• Food goes bad sooner than expected

• Life happens where plans change or food mood change

To fuel our brainstorming, we asked ourselves, how might we create a smart and simple solution that teaches Molly the best practices for storing perishable food items and helps her be mindful about taking steps toward reducing food waste in her household?

Ideation

As we started we only thought of the digital space but as we thought about it more, the problem at hand needed more than that. We thought, what if we leveraged this existing knowledge about reducing food waste that relatively few people read and combined it with tech-enabled food storage containers to power a mobile app that makes it easy to monitor food usage, storage, and waste?

As we work through finding the best solution for the technology embedded into the containers we’re researching multiple options: C2Sense, an MIT based company, has developed a microchip that is cheap to produce and that can measure up certain gases released by food as it goes bad. BlakBear, another tech startup with a similar technology, is also hoping to contribute to food waste reduction. Both microchips can work with bluetooth low energy technology and communicate data in real time to the phone app through cloud technology so that users can stay ahead of the curve and avoid food spoilage. A simple QR code would make it easy to scan a container and communicate with the app, allowing users to add or remove stored food.

We envision a sustainable product using glass and/or recycled materials, with all the tech being embedded in the lid.

Prototyping

Due to time constraints, we moved from sketching screens to creating mid-fi wireframes pretty quickly and started incorporating some first thoughts on the look of the app.

To prepare for our first round of user testing, we moved to a high-fi clickable prototype and asked users to complete the flow of the 3 main features:

• Set up a container

• Monitor freshness

• Respond to nudges via a notification

User Testing and Outcomes

It turned out, users had no problems moving through the flow of the app and they really enjoyed the notification feature, but had some suggestions for how the dashboard could be improved:

Some updates we made were: 

• Ordering the container list from least to most fresh - and adding an indicator icon to the containers that required action soon

• We also clarified what the countdown circle meant by placing the countdown date in line with the circle visual

The most surprising thing we learned from users was that they really wanted to see more of their results from using Wasteless. For some reason, we hadn’t anticipated the Impact page would be so important and we were completely wrong. We thought through how the Impact page could come to life as a place for users to track their progress and see which types of food they’re wasting most-often.

With these updates made, we completed an additional round of testing with 6 users before making final iterations.

Conclusions and Future Opportunities

We want to continue this project and see how we can take our ideas and bring it into the physical space. We are currently looking into who we need to talk to do this and how to go about funding it.