A whopping one-third of food produced globally for human consumption is reported to be wasted each year. This waste is largely attributable to poor food waste management practices by food producers, food vendors, and even consumers, who discard food that could otherwise be given out for free or sold off at discounted rates just before they become unfit for human consumption.

The implications of this oversight are numerous as it leads to food insecurity, causes environmental harm, and depletes economic resources used in food production.

To design a food waste management platform that leverages technology to curb this problem by incentivising food vendors to convert potential food waste to monetary sales. Providing consumers access to  foods close to their expiration date(yet edible) at discounted rates.

It is critical to create a platform which helps to control the societal imbalance that food waste causes.

Our Approach began with seeking to get a better understanding of the food distribution between vendors and consumers. Our research employed both quantitative and qualitative research (which catered to food vendors) methods in order to make informed design decisions.

This website is targeted at food vendors (restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, and online food vendors), and consumers (especially people with slim budgets).

We summerised the insights we got from our research into three major points

The accumulation of the various insights and common patterns that came from the target audience' answers helped the creation of two user personas (representing each section of the target audience.) with stories derived from these personas to inspire design decisions and serve as a checklist to address the key problems likely users encounter.

We curated as many ideas as possible and carefully sifted through the rubble to find the ones that best solve the problem

Our solution was inferred from the insights garnered from the user research and are formulated to ensure a smooth user experience.

The Landing page will essentially provide a general overview of the offered service; contain hyperlinks that will encourage users to buy food and a loyalty rewards hyperlink for customer conversion. 

Logo: In addition to a word-mark for simplicity, an emblem signifying a food bowl was included to represent an idea of the service intended to be rendered, as well as to stand out from similar applications.

Colours: In consideration of the service to be rendered and general human behavioural  instinct of doubt towards food close to its expiration, the colour 'green' was selected as the primary colour, to evoke the feelings of freshness, safety, and nature amongst potential users. Green is also reported to have a calming and soothing effect on the human eye.

Type: In order to effectively communicate to users, we selected the sans serif font 'Inter' (which features a tall x-height and multiple weights to aid accessibility and readability) and paired with 'Gilroy' (which features bold wider characters and aids readability)  for a calmer feel.

This flow represents the very essence of the website, which are simple tasks and actions the users would take to complete a food purchase transaction.

We went minimalist keeping things as plain and clear as possible so that no data or information is lost or misinterpreted

We tested our with a small sample size of bout 10 people. One of the major complaints was the inability to add items to cart without having to expand the entire item. The feedback received led to tweaks of the landing page and an “add to cart” hover feature was introduced. We also discovered that our design was not all so responsive so we worked on the mobile version(which we should have taken into account from the start of the project)

Testing and iteration continues as the product goes fully into development and shipping

This project was a learning experience for many of us on the team. We learnt our strengths and tried to leverage on them

As regards the product itself: we understand that the task of reducing food waste is a huge one, however, we are optimistic our product will play a fair part if deployed and managed properly