Nourishing physical and mental health

This exploration into what a food app could offer stemmed from challenges that working professionals may face with cooking at home.

Most of us understand that cooking at home has a number of benefits including being more in control of what we eat and saving money. Yet factors such as mental fatigue after a long day at work and the convenience of getting takeaway often win out.

As with a lot of ‘adulting’ chores such as cleaning, if our frame of mind is not at its best, we may feel too mentally tired to do it. In that way, we fail before we even begin… and may find ourselves putting it off constantly.

So what if meal prep didn’t have to seem like such a chore?

In this ideation exercise, my high-level goals were:

• making it easy – what are some barriers in the meal preparation journey and how might I solve them?
• making it customisable – what are some features that could be useful to those with dietary preferences/restrictions?

Ain’t nobody got time for that!

Getting groceries delivered is not an entirely new concept. Here in Hong Kong, you could order groceries online or on mobile (e.g. ParknShop, Yuu, HKTVmall). Elsewhere in Europe, Oceania and the US, companies like HelloFresh offers groceries by way of meal kits.

Meal kits offer a solution to manually adding up ingredients so you know what quantities you need to buy. This removes a key barrier that came up repeatedly when I asked friends and family of different ages about why they might prefer eating out or ordering takeaway meals. While I had working professionals in mind as the users, I found out quickly that even older retired folks might be interested in the concept as they felt it took the ‘mental work’ out.

Meal prep from anywhere

Both older and younger respondents were open to the idea of meal kits. However, the older ones veered towards ordering them on a desktop device. One explained that she feels more confident making purchases online with a desktop device because she’d see the screen more clearly. On the other hand, younger respondents preferred mobile, citing that it would be convenient to do their meal prep while commuting.

A happy compromise, since the idea of buying food as meal kits appeals to a wide demographic, would be to offer both desktop and mobile device experiences. Whichever the device, the experiences should be as consistent as possible so users can switch easily between them. For example, an older user might buy meal kits on desktop but find it easier to follow the recipes on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet once they’re in the kitchen.

Narrow down my options

Reviews are mixed in terms of how well some meal kit platforms do in offering health-conscious options. Food plays a big part in our well-being, so this had to be a key feature in the reimagined food app. Users should be able to filter recipes by dietary needs easily, e.g. diabetes, heart health, low-sodium, low-fat, and low-cholesterol. They should also be able to filter out recipes containing allergens they’re sensitive to.

Lastly, we should account for users who might have dietary preferences rooted in their beliefs, e.g. vegan, kosher, halal.

I don’t know what I want

I was inspired by a Think with Google article on how KFC boosted sales by engaging hungry Australians via search. It made me think back to the many “What do you want to eat?” conversations I’ve had at the office which often resulted in a shrug. The decision paralysis is real. So what if we gave users suggestions?

• Suggestions via an algorithm – suggest recipes that you might enjoy based on what you’ve ordered before. These could be a mix of recipes with similar prep times, recipes of a certain cuisine, and more.
• Suggestions via a quiz – answer a few questions such as “Spicy food: yay or nay?” and “How much time do you have?” to help the algorithm narrow down what you might be in the mood for.
• Suggestions via favourites – there’s also the possibility of letting users ‘heart’ recipes they like, and reminding them about the favourites they’ve saved but haven’t tried ordering yet.

Of course, some users may prefer routine and others enjoy having go-to dishes they know they enjoy. So I also included a ‘top 10 favourites’ bar on the ‘Home’ screen.

Offline areas to explore

Food delivery is not a purely online experience so I decided to let my imagination dive into the offline aspects too.

Good for you, good for the Earth

If we think that the way our takeaway orders are packaged is wasteful… imagine the packaging that could go into each meal kit ordered. But besides reducing packaging where possible, we could consider biodegradable packaging.

In Southeast Asia, banana leaves were often used to wrap some foods like Nasi Lemak and Otah Otah. Recently, banana leaves have become a popular choice of material for produce packaging in Thailand and Vietnam.

To reduce excessive packaging waste, we could also consider giving users the option to:

• remove items from their tally – for example, they could remove sachets of salt and pepper from their total when they review the ingredients aggregated from their chosen recipes.
• buy those items in bulk – for example, instead of getting numerous salt and pepper sachets, they could choose to buy seasoning in a bottle which they can then reuse or recycle.

And good for the community

While this might go beyond the immediate design remit, I thought about how such a food app could look into corporate social responsibilities such as food waste and hunger.

I first saw Tristram Stuart’s ‘The Global Food Waste Scandal‘ TED talk in 2012 but the message has still stuck with me. In it, he details how food is thrown away simply because it isn’t the right shape, size or colour. But what if we raised awareness about this issue with users, and let them choose whether they’d be OK to receive ingredients that may look less than perfect but are still edible?

Next, I looked at some estimates online (such as this 2013 hunger map from the World Food Programme) around how much it would cost to feed a hungry child. A few sources cite USD 0.25 a day, which is a little under HKD 2 a day. What is chump change to us could make a difference for someone else. So what if we gave users the option to round up their total, with the rounded-up portion going towards charities that feed people in need?

Empowerment can take place on multiple levels. I like to believe that most people will choose to do good especially when they’re given the power and even more so when they can see the impact their choices have. This has been a fun exercise in ideating (and possibly indulging in some idealisation). I’m hopeful that one day, I might have the opportunity to turn it into reality.