“Clip” Food Waste in the Bud
By Adithi Raghavan, Khushi Shashidhar, Ben Zhang, Sarah Khan
Problem and Solution Overview
Food waste is a well-documented problem in the United States; however, a lesser known problem is its relationship with the financial sustainability of its consumers. A user group that especially struggles with this is college students. The average college student spends around $500 monthly on food [1]. Given that college students have a monthly budget of $2,270, their food spendings alone is roughly 25% of their monthly budget [4]. However, more than 1 in 3 college students find it difficult to afford food, instead deciding to skip meals [2]. Although grocery stores sell food for multiple servings and portions, college students tend to buy food individually. This results in an inability to consume all the food before the expiry date, and results in wasted food (and money). Furthermore, hunger leads shoppers to spend more money on food as well as non-food items according to a study on consumerism [5]. This only furthers the potential to overbuy as food is not finished.
If college students (or any homeowner for that matter) are able to share commonly used ingredients with others, then it’s highly likely that less food is wasted, which reduces spending costs and increases monetary sustainability. This led us to focus on a solution where college students could collaborate with their roommates. To this effort, we designed a set of hardware clip components with a companion app. Like using a food clips to mark grocery items, college students could use the hardware clips on their grocery items where the hardware clips would have an added feature of displaying ownership and food expiration dates. The companion phone app allows the college students to adjust the settings displayed on their food clips.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
Given our focus on the financial impact of food waste, particularly for college students, we decided to target users who are 18–24 years old college students who are living away from home (eg. in the dorms on campus or in an apartment off campus). This user group is especially impacted by the financial costs of food waste as they must plan their meals, shop for groceries, budget for costs between eating out vs. cooking a meal, and plan their efforts with roommates. These various activities show other stakeholders, including any people with roommates or housemates, any people who share their groceries (whether living together or not), and the grocery stores from which users buy their food. Since it is unrealistic to live alongside our user group to gather information on their food planning habits, we gathered data from surveys and diary studies where it may be more manageable and effective to gather information on their habits. We chose these methods in particular since it is most aligned within our time and resource constraints as college students ourselves, while still serving to provide valuable data.
The goal of the surveys was to gain basic demographic information, as well as simple open and close-ended answers about people’s food eating, saving, and sharing habits. The diary studies helped to provide us with a more in-depth understanding of each participant’s daily tasks and how often they complete certain food-sharing and saving activities.
Design Research Results and Themes
Two major low-level themes emerged from the design research we conducted: college-age students (18–24 year olds) living with at least 1 roommate developed a habit of sharing their food and groceries with their roommates and these college-age students developed an inherent mutual understanding of ownership and responsibility (attitude) towards shared food items.
To support the first theme, we learned from the survey results that 90% of 20 respondents share food and groceries with their roommates at varying levels equally split between three categories of extents: all the time, frequently, and sometimes. To explore this statistic further, we attempted to clarify what items or conditions led to certain food items being shared all the time versus only sometimes. One thought that arose concerned the shelf life of certain food items (perishables vs. non-perishables). Through a diary study, we garnered insight into this via qualitative participant responses that described factors such as unique dietary requirements or restrictions (vegan person buying soy chorizo as a protein substitute [Diary Study Participant 2]) and the item’s shelf life impacting the sharing frequency for certain items. Perhaps, due to the short shelf life of perishables, these items would be less likely to be shared and more prone to individual consumption whereas non-perishables such as chips or pasta would lend themselves better to a higher frequency of sharing since a longer timeframe for using the item(s) exists. Such items often exist in a pantry in a bag of some sort, leading us to explore the physical clip design mentioned below further.
To support the second theme, from survey results and diary study responses, we observed that a mutual understanding of shared ownership exists concerning food items. This attitude of shared ownership often incentivizes roommates to help one another finish a food item before its expiration date (shared ownership includes shared responsibility which includes a shared common goal of finishing the food without wasting it). Such an observation ties into the previous idea noted in the first theme that the varying perishable nature of food items influences not only frequency of sharing, but also the general distribution of ownership or responsibility. For instance, one participant shared that in response to the meals that they ate and whose groceries that they came from, the participant shared that they “[ate] 2 meals so far — my groceries and some of my roommates.” Another participant shared that their housemates went for groceries and that they “[did] use those groceries for snacks like bananas, eggs, etc.” Thus, there is an inherent sharing system or schema that roommates develop after having bought groceries. We try to embody this abstract system in a more concrete form with our clip design and companion app.
Proposed Design
Our design includes a unique implementation involving a hardware clip component paired with a companion app. The hardware clip can be used to clip items to keep them from going bad (e.g. chip bags), and offers an intuitive design for easily classifying shared items. Food items often have the expiration date either hidden in hard-to-find areas or in small text, which is why our hardware clip highlights the expiration date on the in-unit display, which provides an accessible way to view information regarding food expiration.
This design is well-suited for our user group (ages 18–24 with roommates), as it clearly designates items that can and cannot be shared amongst people which is a common thing to do in a roommate dynamic where the roommates are not necessarily close enough to share all food (unlike a 4-person family) or split all expenses equally. Moreover, the companion app allows users to easily keep track of inventory, shared items, expiration dates, and meal planning from their phone. For adults in our age group, a phone is a common item which means the app would be accessible to most people in our user group.
Our clip allows for users to deal with difficult tasks, such as splitting groceries and meals among the people a user lives with. This can involve splitting up food items based on certain dietary restrictions, as well as simply choosing to designate certain items on a financial basis.
After groceries are bought, the clip can be attached to relevant items. After that, food assignment and expiration date can be manually set on the companion app, which will keep track of relevant dates and assignments.
After all the food items are logged and stored, it’s inevitable that some food may be neglected and get close to its expiry date. When that happens, our companion app will suggest recipes to relevant users (users that the food is assigned to), encouraging group meal planning. The end goal is to make group meal planning a routine, which will prompt users in a residence to buy food items together so as to not overbuy or waste any leftovers.
