Tackling food sustainability
Problems addresses by designers are often complex and cannot be solves in a simple and linear sequence. Design Thinking is a protocole that help us solve complex problems and discovering new opportunities by devising desirable solutions for the users. Food sustainability is the wicked problem we decided to tackle with my team.
So, where to begin with?
What does “food sustainability” even mean? Sustainability has been a buzzword for a while now and it can mean so many things! Kylie Ackers, Co-founder of Eco & Beyond, gives a pretty thorough and digest definition in an article on ecoandbeyond.co.
It’s Not Just About The Food.
Sustainable food isn’t only about the food itself. It’s a combination of factors including how the food is produced, how it’s distributed, how it’s packaged and how it’s consumed.
That confirms how wide the topic is! But for such a complex topic, the process is actually simple and can be divided in three main steps.
1. Empathizing
We started to dive into online researches to find quantitative data to get a big picture of the topic: case studies, statistics, politic statements, platforms aiming to develop food sustainability awareness in the community…
In France, the observation is quite clear: people have good intentions to have a more sustainable behavior. The awareness emerged significantly this year during the lockdown and the urge to support French farmers, and in general the national economy facing the hardest times ever during this pandemic.
Good. Intentions are always the first step towards change. But do they actually change their consumption behavior on a long run? Too soon to confirm yet…
Last year, 60% of food and beverages consumed in France were NOT locally produced, and organic food represented only 6,1% of the household purchases.
Our researches led us to the following assumptions: people want to consume sustainable food to support local economy and because local products are good quality. However, they feel limited because it’s more expensive and not easy to access the local farmers.
That being said, it’s time to confirm (or not) our assumptions with users interviews.
We interviewed a wide panel of eleven people with a common habit: love to cook and buy fresh fruits and vegetables. We met mainly women (72%) living in a large city and aged between 25–60 years old and discussed their food shopping habits and behaviors.
It’s important to buy local and promote our economy
These interviews confirmed our first assumptions and gave us new insights on why a sustainable behavior is important for them. The positive insights were the healthy value of sustainable food, planet-care, and we didn’t expect that, the social bound they tie with their local shops.
I love choosing my own products and getting recommendations from the grocer”
As for the limitations, again, assumptions confirmed 🎯 , on top of what we cana add a very recurring and interesting paint point: they feel lost in the amount of informations they are given about food in general, so they end up buying what is more practical, despite their initial good intentions.
I try to be more health-conscious but I am more practical, I take what is easier.
The information is so unclear when you want to decide which product to choose.
After gathering so many insights, we mixed and matched the findings to brainstorm and identify the main problem to tackle: the lack of information paired with unclear labels and mistrust towards some initiatives and organic appellations, reveal the difficult access to information.
All those rich insights allowed us then to build our persona.
2. Define
Let me introduce you to Sofia, the busy bee, wannabe a sustainable consumer:
Sofia has very good intentions to consume in a conscious and healthy way because she got influenced by the several documentaries she saw about the food industry and some of her friends have already changed their behaviors. However, she is frustrated as she doesn’t know how to make better food choices and she got confused in the large amount of conflicted information about sustainability.
Let’s follow her in her food shopping journey to grasp the difficulties she faces.
To satisfy her needs, she enjoys going to the greengrocer to buy veggies and fruits to support her local shop and because she enjoys his recommendations. Then, she goes to the supermarket to complete her grocery list and that’s where the troubles begin…
She quickly faces her first difficulty at the vegetables aisle where she doesn’t understand the price of a vegetable she fancies that is way more expensive than at the greengrocer. Then again, at the egg section, she doesn’t understand the labels: free-range, organic, organic+free range, “Label Rouge”… She ends up buying the eggs with the packaging that looks the most trustworthy to her. But again, she was lost in the information!
That leads us to state that Sofia needs to find transparent & educational information (prices, origin, label) on how to make healthy and ethical food choices, because she gets confused about what to consume and ends up buying what is more practical.
3. SESAME, the key to become a sustainable customer
Our persona’s difficulties were clear design opportunities for us, and we came with a cross-channel solution we called SESAME:
Here is more details of the features we imagined for SESAME:
To be a more sustainable consumer, take better care of her health & diet,
and combine quality food & pleasure, Sofia now has all the information at hand !
Key learnings
As a first wicked problem to tackle, we chose a very accurate one and inspiring one! Each one of us sees a bit of herself in Sofia. We should all have SESAME in our life to make a big change on our consumption habits!
Even if at first I felt a little overwhelmed by the width of the topic, I am pretty happy with the solution we came up with, and I do believe there so many other possibilities to help solving such an important matter.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this case study brought some sesame into your life!
Disclaimer: deep apologies to the sesame allergic people, our solution is the only sesame that cannot hurt you!
