Summary

Root-Ta-Bag is a platform that connects people with the source of their food. This application shows you information about grocery stores near you and highlights locally grown products as well as seasonal products while providing detail about where it was farmed and who farmed it. Root-Ta-Bag's goal is to provide information of the products and farmers for the food that the customer is consuming so they can have a deeper connection with their food and ultimately reduce the amount of food they waste.

With only a four day timeline on our design sprint, we had to answer critical business questions and create a prototype that will ultimately determine whether or not this product is a viable solution to the problem space.

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Problem Space

Food waste is an emerging issue which has received increasing scientific and societal attention during the last decade. Along with many other global issues, food waste has the potential for significant environmental impacts. What can society do to reduce the amount of food that we waste?

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Research

The world is producing 17% more food that it did 30 years ago, yet almost half of it is being wasted. Global food loss and waste amounts to between one-third and one-half of all food produced. $31 billion worth of food is wasted in Canada alone, every year. This is approximately 40% of entire food produced yearly in Canada. Overall cost exceeds this amount if we include the accumulative cost of associated wastes (i.e. energy, water, land, labour, transport, etc).

The Numbers

Half of all food produced worldwide is wasted. When we considered the effects of this problem space on a more personal bases, we discovered single family households in Toronto discard over 600lbs of food waste each year, which costs taxpayers roughly $10 Million to dispose of. Nationally, this problem costs Canada $31 Billion each year.

Canadian Food Waste

We began to inform ourselves about the problem space by researching and understanding related and surrounding issues, specifically in Canada. An investigation of where waste occurs through Canada’s food value chain lead us to an important insight that 47% of all waste occurs on the consumer level. We decided that by targeting this market segment, any solution that we produced would have the largest potential for impacting the problem space.

We conducted a number of interview with consumers that helped validate the list of speculations and assumptions about their relationships with food, shopping routines, and wasteful tendencies. Learning about actual people and situations within our problem space allowed us to more effectively understand some of the pain points that resulted in food waste, and identify opportunities for potential solutions. We discovered that a majority of people lacked any emotional connection to the food they purchased, and therefore lacked any sense of remorse when it was wasted. Our goal was to find a way in which we could better inform consumers about the production processes of their food, in a hopes that it would increase their sense of value for it and limit the likelihood that it be wasted.

How might we help people build a deeper and more meaningful connection to the food they eat by establishing a relationship with food producers?

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Persona

We synthesized the insights from our customer interviews, and began to illustrate a persona that was representative of an actual food-wasting consumer.

Mike, the Workaholic

“I want to support local produce and seasonal fruits ore but it’s so hard to find them at local grocery stores.”

Mike is 25, and lives in the suburbs of Toronto with his wife. He goes grocery shopping with his wife 1-2 times a week and buys in bulk. He prepares most his meals throughout the week but still goes out for lunch and dinner on occasion.

Experience Map

By elaborately building up these personas personality, lifestyle, etc. we were able to empathize with his motivations, and map out a scenario that helped illustrate Mike directly interacting with food waste as a consumer.

Mike's experience map allowed us to visually identify his pain points, and convert them into a list of opportunities where we could introduce technology to help alleviate their impact on foodwaste.

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Solution

As a high-level concept, our focus was to deter consumers from any wasteful tendencies they had by providing a way in which they could strengthen the emotional connection they had with the food they purchase. Illustrating to them the specific people and processes behind food items they may take for granted would hopefully help to achieve this.

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Wireframes

After a series of sketches, ideation and voting, we were able to combine our ideas together into wireframes to help bring our product to life.

Once we had our wireframed task completed we were able to do some light hallway usability testing before we went into the hi-fidelity phase.

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Hallway Test Results

Off the bat there were some problems with the functionality of our product.

1. Users didn't exactly know what to do in the initial screen with the map and how it connected to the local farm list
2. Users were confused about the farm list and the farmer names
3. We introduced a live chat system to talk directly to the farmers, but users thought this will only be a hassle to the farmers

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Branding

Between wireframing, testing and hi-fidelity mockups, we were able create a brand for our product.

Root-Ta-Bag

Our mission is to bring reconnect people with their food, giving them a stronger emotional attachment to where it comes from and how it was produced. By connecting people to the farmers, we bring the root of your food to your bag, thus Root-Ta-Bag.

Hi-Fidelity

After receiving some insight on our wireframes, we were ready to produce hi-fidelity mockups.

1. We added coach marks to the app to help the user understand our product and it's functionality
2. We added some hierarchy between farm names and the owners of the farms
3. Removed chat feature, but had links to social media and email

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Mockup

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Results

After much reflection, our team has been able to identify several aspects of the current prototype that could be improved in order to generate the largest possible impact on our problem space.

We realize that there needs to be a larger overarching incentive in order to encourage users to not only use our application, but more importantly, continually reduce their food-waste.

We believe that by partnering with specific grocery stores, we could create a customer-loyalty incentive structure that rewarded customers for continuing to buy produce from certain farmers. Hopefully, this would help to continually deepen each customers understanding and appreciation for the food they purchase, and help them to waste less.

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Root-Ta-Bag Team

A quick shoutout to Sonal Batavia, Grant Cottrelle and Min Young Lee. Root-Ta-Bag would not have been created without these talented designers.

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