Locallyours: Bringing small plates to a big stage

Richard Jiang, Sabrina Pearson, Yuji Lai, Jimmy Nguyen

Problem and Solution Overview

During this pandemic, small businesses in the US have been permanently closing at a rapid rate. We wanted to focus on specifically helping remedy the disparities that small restaurants face during COVID. Due to competition from larger restaurant brands and the perishable nature of their products, small restaurants have a particularly difficult time creating and maintaining a large customer base and curbing food waste in these unpredictable times. To help with these issues, Locallyours is a subscription service that would provide local chefs from small restaurants within a given community a platform to showcase their food and history in a unique and personable manner that also helps cut down on food waste and benefits the community at large. Locallyours strives to provide local small restaurants with the opportunity to highlight their food as locally ours, belonging to and being a vital part of the community, and locally yours, something that is tailored to you as a local.

Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants

To get more insights related to our problem space, we wanted to collect information from small restaurant owners, restaurant staff, and patrons in the local communities. It was important to collect information from both the owners and staff in order to understand the business goals and the day-to-day functioning of restaurants during COVID. We also wanted to hear from local potential customers their thoughts on ordering food during COVID. As we were currently in a pandemic, in-person methods of research were not viable and so we conducted interviews via online video conferencing platforms with three small restaurant owners from three different locations in the US to get their unique perspectives on the major struggles that they face as small restaurant owners and we distributed online surveys to gauge the interest of restaurant patrons in various potential solutions and received 23 responses.

Design Research Results and Themes

Supply Chain

Firstly, all of the restaurant owners we interviewed struggled with maintaining access to their supply chain. This may be due to suppliers having a limited delivery window or are no longer offering delivery services during the pandemic and this may be due to suppliers having staffing issues themselves. Some of our interviewees have thus turned to alternative sources for fresh ingredients but sourcing from non-wholesale means has proven to be costly.

Profit Margins

Secondly, our interviewees all felt that delivery apps such as UberEats or online marketing platforms such as Yelp cut into their profit margins significantly. As the pandemic has forced restaurants to pivot toward delivery services, these restaurants now rely on delivery apps more and more to distribute their food. However, when these delivery apps charge steep fees in order to have food delivered, it severely impacts the profits that these restaurants are able to bring in. One of our interviewees noted that delivery apps cut 23% into their profits and that, on a bad day, their restaurant’s profits all went toward fees from these delivery apps.

Finding Restaurants

From our research on restaurant patrons, almost all patrons found small restaurants by recommendations from friends or family and walking or driving by. The second most popular method was through using Google Maps, followed by using platforms like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Instagram. When finding restaurants and considering where to order from, patrons wanted to know more about the food costs, reviews, and appearances. Specifically, they wanted to find a restaurant’s exact menu online more easily, to read lots of reviews of these restaurants from others especially friends, and to know more about the restaurant such as how long they have been in business as well as their political views. Some patrons did mention that they felt safer ordering from a chain restaurant than a small restaurant because they knew better about what they were ordering. The top ways a restaurant could attract a patron are through providing good food and providing a sense of convenience. A small number of patrons were willing to pay a significant amount monthly to support a small restaurant that they favor extremely.

Proposed Design

Through our research, we found that small restaurant owners wanted to continue to reach and connect with customers while also staying safe during the pandemic. Food waste was also cited as a major problem. We also found that customers would enjoy a convenient way to find new local owned restaurants while also staying safe. Thus, our solution is to provide a platform for a subscription service that highlights a few local chefs each week. This service will create a stage for local small restaurants to broadcast their stories, boost their brands against larger chain restaurants, and enable small restaurants to reach and connect with more customers, creating more long-lasting partisanship for them in the local community. Each chef will offer a limited selection of their menu as part of this meal box service along with any sort of physical add-ons (e.g., info card, souvenir, trinket, etc.) to enhance and personalize the meal experience they are offering. This process will help reduce food waste for restaurants as orders for any particular day are known ahead of time and excess food can either be resold at a discount or donated to a soup kitchen through this platform and restaurant owners will increase their local reach with an emphasis on each owner’s/dish’s story.

Below is a storyboard on how a small restaurant owner could leverage this platform in order to precisely prepare a limited selection of their usual restaurant offerings to prevent major food waste and reach a predetermined audience through the subscription service’s subscribers. The storyboard features a customer using the subscription service to choose what they would like to eat during the week and a restaurant owner receiving the next day’s orders at the end of the previous day. The owner then knows exactly how much produce to purchase from the supplier the following morning and exactly how many meal boxes to prepare. The prepared meal boxes then get distributed to customers through the delivery system that is built into the subscription service platform and the meal boxes arrive safely at the customer’s home.