Foodfolio is a real-time inventory information system that helps restaurants manage inventory by tracking the usage of each ingredient based on menu, recipe, and sales data.
MY ROLE
TEAM
PROJECT
TIMELINE
Interview Moderator Data Analyst Concept Creator Wireframes Prototyper
Sookie Lee Isha Agarwal
Master's Capstone Project advised by a google team
Jan 2022 - Aug. 2022
Concept Video
Perfecting the inventory Checking
The project started with the topic of food sustainability. We noticed that wasting food is a serious problem and the restaurant industry takes a big role in it. We found that the main reason for wasting food in restaurants is that manual inventory checking causes overstock. The challenge for designers is how to precisely predict customer traffic and provide an accurate amount of inventory needs.
Key Features
External Systems Integrated
real-time data Analysis
Inventory Management
Menu-tailored inventory updating
Vendor Orders
ONe-click, inventory refilled
Dashboard
Status analysis STAYs UP to date
Menu promotion
Right decision, in the right time
we started with
Wasting food is not just about FOOD.
Termenology
Food Loss
Unused product from the agricultural sector, such as unharvested crops.
Excess food means edible food that is not sold or used and which is being disposed of due to failing to meet "a satisfied quality or conditions".
Food Waste
Plate waste, spoiled food, or peels and rinds considered inedible that is sent to feed animals, to be composted or anaerobically digested, or to be landfilled or combusted with energy recovery.
Secondary Research
Economic
$940 billion USD
Environment
landfill & incineration
People
food insecure
1/3 amount of food, which is 1.3 billion tones, produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally each year.
Single and most common material landfilled and incinerated in the US
1 in 9 people remain undernourished.
In Washington State
Restaurants are the main contributor to food waste in consumers facing business
(Almost all is recycled.)
How Might We encourage restaurants in WA to participate more actively to reduce food waste?
Primary Research
Research Questions
How and where is excess food being generated in the food lifecycle?
What are the challenges restaurants are facing in managing excess food?
What impact does excess food bring to a restaurant operation?
How do business owners currently prevent and dispose of surplus food?
How do the industrial systems(supply chain/legal/policies) affect food waste?
research method 1
Expert interview
We networked and connected to 2 professors who have been delving into food wasting problem and experience of running project about it. The expert interviews aim to understand the current actions and strategy that food rescuer applying, obstacles we do not noticed in real world, and suggestions to validate our visions.
Marie Spiker
Assistant Professor, Epidemiology Sustainable food systems
Irini Spyridakis
Assistant Teaching Professor, HCDE Co-founder, and Director of Meal matchup
research method 2
Semi-structure interview
I designed a 45 minutes semi-structured interview. The interview was aiming to understand what restaurants experience about excess food and how restaurants see the excess food from their perspective, which highly requires details in daily operation.
At same time, I had a reminder in mind that the topic may bring some negative fact participants may be not comfortable to talk about and my questions and the way to ask question should be careful.
The recruitment was tuff and unpredictable.
We sent invitations to restaurants listed on an association's website.- 1/30 RESPONSE
We kept asking for referrals from friends, connected participants and walked into restaurants to invite them in person.
5
4
1
1
Manager
Owner
Chef
Waiter/Waitress
With experience
4
2
3
3
20+ years
11 - 20 year
6 - 10 years
2 - 5 year
research method 3
Contextual Inquiry
With the semi-structured interviews went on, I noticed that to better understand how a restaurant manage their inventory is important, a space arrangement is a required concept for us to understand.
Also, observing on side gave us an another view on how restaurant operations. We referred it to analysis user interviews, which are highly subjective of interviewees perspective.
research method 4
Competitive Analysis
I found more than 30 products maketing about improving the usability of foods. Our purpose applying the competitive analysis was to picture an overview of the whole production process, gain a deeper understanding of the work being done in the system, understand what kind of a market and potential competitors we face, and recognize areas of opportunities we have.
How do we collect research data?
Research Data Synthesis
Affinity Mapping
Groupe notes:
by Questions & Interviewees by Stages in the Industry Process by Similarities & Differences
Summarize key themes:
Monetary Impact
Human Error
Low Awareness
Food Journey Map
I proposed to use a food journey map to list outstanding notes in two lanes: causes and strategy of wasting food and five columns: key steps in the food production process. I also combined a competitive analysis into the food journey map, which helps us see which stages the current solutions on market focus on. The purpose here is to dig out the causes of the problem, current solutions in practice, and potential opportunities in the current market.
What do we learn from the research?
Finding & insights
Food is an expensive cost.
Reducing food costs is a strong motivator.
Most solutions focus on reducing the expense of food.
Food cost is the measurement of wasted food and drives improvement in the management process.
“So, primarily, how waste impacts our business is cost. First and foremost” -- P8
“Food cost as a percentage of revenue is about a third...That's very, very expensive. It's almost as expensive as the cost of Labor.” -- P2
The inaccuracy of the guesstimates in preparation is a main cause.
Minimizing the inaccuracy of the guesstimates for the vendor order can reduce waste happening in the inventory.
Restaurants rely on intuition and experience in every stage of the process which could possibly result in human errors.
Inaccurate estimates can cause over-stock which then results in waste if not used.
“Then the head chef might end up ordering too much or too little based on the daily inventories that they got” -- P6
“For the restaurant industry, I'll say there isn't any like certain metrics to predict the sales and customer and the amount of food. It's not predictable.” -- P3
Reducing liability and effort encourage saving excess food.
“It depends on ... and who’s willing to come pick it up because we don’t have time or resources to go out there and make these deliveries ourselves” -- P7
Reducing liability and effort encourages saving excess food.
Donating food requires extra effort and labor from the staff and highly depends on their enthusiasm.
When giving away food, restaurants are concerned about risks due to liability and people loitering around their store.
“We sell the raw food so if there is a health issue, it’ll come to us. So we don’t participate in donating .” -- P4
Flexible menus rescue food from being wasted.
“We like to buy them (food or ingredient) so that they're used in 4 or 5 or 10 recipes.” -- P2
Well-designed menus could maximize the use of every piece of food.
Edible food gets thrown away often because they don’t meet the high standards of “servable” food.
Food can be converted and repurposed for various cuisines.
“It’s really what you’re serving. How you build your menu. Because most restaurants will build menus with waste built into it. -- P8
Saving food can be more than an afterthought.
Restaurants don't have knowledge about resources and programs that help reduce wasting excess food.
Staff do not feel good about food waste and try taking initiatives within their own means.
“There's a whole series of skills you have to develop and you get trained for all of those things. They tend not to be around food waste.” -- P2
“But also yeah we do not want to throw I mean it just feels bad really just having to go in and throw food away it's a lot of work but it's also yeah, it kind of hurts your soul, a little bit.” -- P8
from RESEARCH to DESIGN
Design Implication
A hassle free system to improve inventory management
Research Insights
Research Impacts
Insight 01
Expensive COST
Establish an expectation that reducing food waste improves profit margin.
Insight 02
Inventory Accuracy
Minimize the discrepancy from the ingredient demand estimate and improve the precision of ordering and tracking in inventory management.
Insight 03
Effortless and hassle-freee
Build a hassle-free systemthat supports restaurants tracking food usage records.
Insight 04
Menu data should be valued.
Connecting data from the dining hall to help data at the backend of the restaurant.
Insight 05
More awareness and info
Bring awareness upfront that the food waste problem is highly correlated with daily behaviors and could be mitigated with knowledge and training.
Ideation
From 60 ideas to the 1 final concept
We started our ideation with 60 ideas.
The 60 ideas cover 3 main stages of food production: preventing excess food from generating, keeping excess food's long shelf life, and raising awareness in the community. 60 ideas were grouped into 11 themes, e.g.: shared fridge, donation & logistics, meal kits, smart inventory, cost tracking, and menu evaluation, and building community, etc.
The criteria I brought up helped the decision making which was guided by our research insights.
Prevent in advance
Reduce cost
Easy to apply
Feasible and novel
Concept evaluation
Trip-tech method to validate the concept and key features
The final concept combined the top 3 ideas: a smart inventory management system. I proposed the Trip-tech method and let the process validate and refine the concept. I prepared a survey and sent it to our target users. The survey included a brief storyboard on each feature respectively illustrates the problem space, the proposed solution, and the ideal status after the problem is resolved.
The main feedback from the survey was that the idea is new and highly possible. Although there are a few products working on inventory management in the market, all focus on cost and billing instead of accurate usage and none of them aims for the usage of ingredients. We were excited about the test result and became more confident to continue to develop the idea.
feature 1
Accurate prediction of inventory needs and easy order with vendors
feature 2
Tracking inventory usage and notification of the shortage
feature 3
Integrate flexibility with the menu.
Concept REfine
Design the details of end-to-end user scenarios
We keep adding more details on the initial concept. By drawing a storyboard, a clear storyline came up and a completed user scenario is built up. Some key moments are: 1. Add tracking menu sales for predicting customer traffic and inventory needs. 2. Added integration with POS and vendor system, 3. Remove the idea of tracking the freshness status in the inventory 4. Add the promotion of menu items that use potential overstock food.
Service blueprint
All touch points and data flows are listed on a service blueprint, which helps to sort out the workflows transporting at the front stage, which is in the kitchen by chefs and managers, and at backstage which is in the foodfolio system.
USER FLOW
I illustrated interactions user would have with screens in the three key features.
Menu recommendation
Placing vendor order
Inventory update
Low-Fidelity Wireframe
Deliver a clean and simple data visualization
We created low-fidelity wireframes to prototype flows of inventory management and order placing.
iteration
Design the direct and clean visualization
The informative dashboard displays notifications, statics, and summarized inventory status.
The inventory page delivers the cleanest and most directly visual layout.
The order management page can generate an orders list that organizes items in an accurate amount of the next purchase circle. Restaurants can easily place orders to multiple vendors with one click.
Popping-up promotion page provides quick decisions to set promotion info.
Takeaway
Screening interviewees more targeted.
Interview participants covered multiple occupations in the restaurant industry. We intend to know more from different perspectives. While I noticed that managers more focus on COST while Chefs more focus on usage. We have more managers than chefs, I would like to interview more Chefs to know what the opinion of chefs is about the food cost.
Prioritizing what users mostly need
The system has so many data and analysis reports to provide to restaurants, which is a task for designers to make decisions on which data/reports are most demanding for a restaurant in a busy operation and which data should be prioritized and notify users for taking an action.
