Waste Not, Want Not: Reducing Food Waste Through Communal Sharing
By Kate Wilkinson, Apollo Zhu, Isabella Nguyen, Derek Carlson
Problem and Solution Overview
Have you ever made a big food purchase at the store and two weeks later you see it sitting there, in the fridge, expired? You are not alone. 44% of all food waste comes from residential households and expiring excess food contributes to this issue (4). Every year, the average American family throws out somewhere between $1,365 and $2,275 with at least 20% due to expiration labels. That is at least $273-$455 being wasted annually, on average, per American household (2)(3). The average American household also wastes, at minimum, between 0.33 metric tons to 0.99 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year due to expiration labels (1)(3). Our proposal, to help alleviate these food expiration waste issues, is a mobile application focused on communal food sharing and food inventory/expiration management. Rather than letting food expire and go to waste, other people within the community may be looking for that exact ingredient. This application would provide options to conveniently share excess food and request ingredients for cooking. It would allow quick sharing to the community of soon-to-be expiring food by knowing the exact inventory of food within each household. For people living in high-density environments where they are within walking distance of their neighbors, this could provide quick access to food and ingredients and cut down on expiring food waste while strengthening community connections between households.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
The design research was conducted through an online survey as well as in-person, video and over-the-phone interviews. The online survey was given to friends, strangers on the University of Washington campus and shared on various social media hubs. The survey was mainly used for a broad overview to determine whether community interaction is something that people would be comfortable with, to estimate the typical frequency of food expiration waste amongst participants, and to find suitable interview candidates. Interviewees were chosen from survey participants living within high density communities while also cooking regularly. The focus of the interview was to determine the design that would best match a solution focused on communal food sharing and expiration awareness through proper food inventory/expiration management. During the interviews, various preconceived designs were shared with the participant in order to evaluate their response. This allowed valuable insights to be made by weighing the merits of the incubated designs against the interviewees’ current day-to-day actions taken in the pursuit of reducing excess food waste and what suggestions they had for the different proposed design solutions.
Design Research Results and Themes
Through surveys we learned that:
- 81% of survey participants throw away expired food on a sub monthly basis. That is excess food/ingredients that could be given away and utilized by another household that needs it.
- 69% of survey participants would not be averse to interacting with their neighbors, but they currently interact seldomly with their neighbors, even amongst those who wished for more interaction. A related task participants identified was sharing food and ingredients as a way to interact and build community with their neighbors.
- What participants cook is based on what ingredients are available at home. The solution, by letting people know what ingredients their neighbors have to share, could increase the recipes participants can conveniently cook, including food outside their usual repertoire.
With guiding information from our survey participants, we interviewed respondents that matched our criteria of living in high density environments to gather a deeper understanding of challenges people face with food waste management and community building. Through short interviews of 15 minutes or more we were able to draw the following conclusions:
- People have varying levels of comfort in interaction with neighbors–while some would love the opportunity to connect with neighbors, some are concerned about safety in Seattle and would need extra levels of verification to feel comfortable meeting others and using our service.
- Some feel that food waste management is not a priority and would only consider taking steps to reduce food waste if it was very convenient to incorporate into their daily life.
With the knowledge of these two concerns we are able to ensure that our proposed solution will address the concerns that would inhibit people from using our app.
Based on the research results, we identified three tasks users do which our design could facilitate: grocery shopping even without a shopping list, picking what ingredients to use in a meal, and preventing leftover ingredients. We thought of three tasks users could do with our design: forming connections with neighbors, communal food sharing, and keeping track of food inventory and expiration.
Proposed Design
The design solution settled on, based on the feedback from user research, is a mobile application focused on two key design aspects out of the six tasks users identified during user research. One being food expiration awareness through quick and intuitive food inventory management. The other, sharing of soon-to-be expiring food within a local community. Focusing solely on these gets to the heart of the identified issue of expiring residential food going to waste.
The majority of inventory management will be automated with machine learning object recognition. The user can scan receipts from food purchases, individual food items, and their fridge or pantry to quickly take inventory. Additionally, food/ingredients can be added manually (or scanned items can be edited) to account for scanning edge cases and things that are unable to be scanned such as homemade meals. Expiration dates can be adjusted and will be calculated in the app. These calculations will be based on information from an individual item being scanned, information from the USDA for unlabelled items, as well as items with only best by dates. Items that are about to expire will be specially marked in the inventory and users will be able to get notifications when items will expire soon. Users will be able to rapidly post an item to the community for sharing by clicking a ‘post’ button on the individual ingredient within the food inventory pane.
Users will be able to view community posts that are giving away food or requesting food. They can also post ingredients and pre-packaged meals themselves, both requesting and giving away. The design will allow for a radius to be set that encompasses an individual’s local community as well as filtering options to be able to navigate to the posts they want quickly and easily. Due to the app knowing when food will expire, it will notify users before food expiration occurs and there will be a post to the community button for each individual ingredient. This way, once they get a notification that they have food expiring soon, unused food can be easily posted with a single tap on the ingredient and it will fill in the required info for the community post. Likewise, notifications for food requests from members of the community will be personalized to the user. This is done by notifying a user when an ingredient share request comes through, but only if they have the ingredient being requested within their current inventory. This is to avoid overwhelming the user with food requests that aren’t applicable to what they have in stock.
References
- Patil, S. (2020, June 16). Carbon footprint of Food Waste. Carbon Lyfe. Retrieved October 5, 2022, from https://www.carbonlyfe.com/blog/carbon-footprint-of-food-waste
- Dating game report — natural resources defense council. (n.d.). Retrieved October 5, 2022, from https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/dating-game-report.pdf
- Commissioner, O. of the. (n.d.). Confused by date labels on packaged foods? U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Retrieved October 5, 2022, from https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/confused-date-labels-packaged-foods
- Understanding food waste. PartSelect.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2022, from https://www.fix.com/blog/food-waste
