Food In, Recipes Out: Designing a Smart Fridge for Food Waste Reduction
By Patrick Ho, Brian Liang, & Justin Yang
Problem and Solution Overview
Food waste is a significant problem for the average household, with approximately one-third of the food in the average American household going uneaten or discarded. This food waste contributes to significant environmental pollution, as 81 percent of household food waste ends up in landfills or combustion facilities (United States Environmental Protection Agency). Furthermore, if regarded as a country, the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by food waste ranks third globally behind China and the United States, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Food waste is also an expensive problem, costing the world around one trillion U.S. dollars per year. We believe that this problem stems from how inaccessible home cooking may seem to those who do not have much experience doing so. Specifically, efficiently using all of the food in one’s refrigerator and pantry may be difficult for individuals who do not have the time or cooking experience to do so. To address this problem, we are proposing a smart fridge solution to easily track food inventory, manage expiration dates, and efficiently generate recipes tailored to the user’s needs both inside and outside the kitchen.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
We conducted studies to learn more about the forms, interactions, features, and tasks that our user group engages in related to the entire food-making process from purchasing to eating to gain insights on how we can best design a system that simplifies this process while reducing food waste. Specifically, we chose to employ the research study methods of interviews and diary studies. The target user group for our design is young adults, specifically undergraduates and new graduates ages 18 to 25, who have little to no experience with home cooking, but would like to create simple, delicious, and affordable meals while reducing their household food waste. We engaged in interviews with our user group as this allowed us to gather detailed information while also allowing room for flexibility in the kinds of information we collected from our participants depending on who they were. We also conducted diary studies to get a better sense of our user group’s habits as well as more detailed specifics related to their food-making process that was most effectively tracked through a diary study. Our participants were UW students and alumni, many of whom were living alone for the first time and were faced with the problems we were aiming to solve. We used UW Facebook groups, the UW discord server, and the UW subreddit to acquire participants, and were able to acquire more than enough participants to gather significant insights. We also recruited a few participants outside of the UW community to ensure that our research results could be generalized to a user group beyond the UW community.
Design Research Results and Themes
Over the course of a week, we conducted three interviews and recruited fifteen participants for our diary study. What we discovered was that there was a split in cooking habits among our participants: around sixty percent of them cooked infrequently and only forty percent of them cooked regularly. However, a commonality that we identified among all of our participants was that they focused on cooking dishes that saved them time and money. In our interviews, we found that many participants relied on cooking skills that they picked up before entering college, so those that were used to cooking at home continued to do so, and those that were not did not cook any more often than they used to. Furthermore, another trend that we noticed was that they were more likely to cook meals later in the day than earlier in the day. Specifically, when breaking down the meals that they reported cooking at home, fifty percent of the meals were dinners, around thirty-two percent were lunches, and only eighteen percent were breakfasts. This finding informed us that young adults may be too busy with work or school to prepare meals. Another key finding that was revealed through our research was that our participants do care about reducing food waste, but felt that it was unrealistic to dedicate more time to doing so. As such, they felt that they would be well served by a tool that could help them reduce their household food waste. Overall, our research confirmed our assumptions of our user group’s priorities: easy-to-prepare and delicious meals.
We also identified three core themes among our research participants’ responses. First, we found out that time management and efficiency were the most important factors for members of our target user group when it comes to deciding whether to cook at home or not. Many participants had to sacrifice an aspect of cooking (nutrition, taste, food sustainability, etc.) to work around this inconvenience. To overcome the problem of their hectic schedules, our participants resorted to approaches such as cooking multiple meals at a time or simply throwing leftovers away. Second, the aggregated results of our diary study revealed that many members of our target user group were turning to “instant” foods, such as frozen or microwavable foods. This is evidenced by how 40% of the participants in the diary study ate at least one “instant” meal a day. While this practice is a very efficient solution for the participants as it provides them with fast and tasty meals, it is unsustainable and unhealthy. Third, we learned through our interviews that the steep learning curve to living independently was a large barrier for members of our target user group. Many young adults simply are not used to living by themselves and thinking about the food waste that they generate. For people who have just started to live away from home and started college, they have many other priorities such as moving and adapting to a new living situation, making new friends, and dealing with their coursework.
Proposed Designs
From our research findings, we discovered that the most important criteria for a potential technology solution are saving time and awareness. By incorporating the design research findings, 2 core user tasks stood out as the most important ones to address in our solution: deciding what to cook for a particular meal and keeping track of what foods are in the fridge and their expiration dates. To support these tasks, we developed a potential technology solution: a smart fridge with a mobile app component. As shown in Figure 1, the average member of our target user group already regularly interacts with their refrigerator when they are hungry, making our solution intuitive for users. Additionally, our smart fridge design affords us the ease of integration with existing technologies. A smart fridge can automatically manage food inventory by using built-in cameras/sensors in addition to ML/AI models to record food being added/removed; there is no impact on the user’s grocery shopping habits and experience. Furthermore, smart fridges are gradually becoming ubiquitous in modern households. These smart fridges are already equipped with a variety of cameras, sensors, and software that complement our design. However, this solution was missing 1 key aspect: allowing the user to check their food inventory outside of the kitchen. To overcome this problem, we added a mobile app component that is synced with the fridge and displays the same, real-time food inventory data.
