FoodBit App

A digital application to reduce around zero food waste.

In my desire to explore more about human behaviour and design interactions, I took part in a course organised by IDEO.org and +Acumen called Design Kit: The Course for Human Centred-Design.

The intensive seven week online programme consisted of three phases. The main goal was to approach a design challenge from a human perspective while putting into practice a set of research methods that aimed to create empathy with the users. From the very beginning each student was encouraged to join a local team and have weekly meet-ups as the course developed.

Our multidisciplinary team consisted of a Developer, a Strategist and me, a Designer.

Our goal was to reduce food waste and improve health alimentations at both household level and supermarkets within our community in Italian cities.

PROCESS

FIRST PROTOTYPE
We conducted two service prototypes. For the first prototype we worked with four families and three singles. From this we learned three things:

• People are lazy, and they prefer waste food instead keep it for another day ( simplicity of waste, complexity of saving / re-purposing food ).

• People believe they don’t need to plan. Recurring habits, special attention to a shopping list or keeping the fridge monitored are key factors to reduce leftovers ( the biggest challenge is managing fresh perishable food )

• People don’t know what to do with left-overs. There is a poor judgement in evaluating fresh food edible conditions and for them left-overs look less appealing than new food.

So, we asked to our self:

• How might we create new incentives for a community that is not driven by money only?
• How might we make leftovers look better or easier to manage than waste?
• How might we install a better food education into the average consumer’s mindset?

A native app for your smartphone that recommends weekly food plans and adjusts your shopping list according to your taste, habits and consume model.

By using deep machine learning algorithms and a smart bin sensor, the app can recommend meals and recipes for the entire household and plan the weekly shopping list in advance.

Food waste can be prevented by recommending recipes that consume ingredients at imminent risk of being wasted or by removing foods that gets frequently trashed by the family members. The app can also adjust the shopping list quantities by using the remote bin sensor to understand how much got trashed.

To make this a sustainable business model we believe that local supermarkets could interact with the smart shopping lists and notify with in-app push notifications local deals on soon-to-be-expired ingredients (through standard digital real-time marketing tools) and by producing nicely designed kitchen smart bins and compatible sensors for existing kitchen trash bins.