Your Choice
An app for students to be part of the food choice at school, with the purpose to help reduce food waste.
During this project we worked in groups and had to focus on the theme of sustainability and further choose a problem within the subject, and then by working with the design thinking process find a solution and implement it into a prototype for an app or website in Figma.
After discussing in the group that consisted of three members, we decided to investigate and take a deeper look into sustainable food consumption and chose food waste as the theme, more specifically within the school environment.
User research, concept, interaction design, information architecture, wireframes, prototype, and tests.
Problem Statement
Food waste is a problem itself, but that it is thrown away and left over a lot of food is something very common in Swedish schools. In total, approximately 6,100 tonnes of food is thrown away in schools per year, food waste and plate waste are included in the figure. During the project, we investigate the measures that can be taken to contribute to an improvement and find a possible solution to this particular problem.
After researching previous solutions and reading articles on the subject, we formulated the problem that would later in the process help us identify our potential users.
Problem statement: How might we reduce food waste in schools and at the same time make the students satisfied with the food, which is nutritive and also adapts to the school’s resources?
User Research
During this phase, 10 semi-structured interviews and 1 observation were conducted in a school that we contacted. Due to covid-19, it became difficult to visit more schools, but we still managed to collect important data.
A total of 9 students between the ages of 11-14 from different schools that we had in our private network were interviewed. The kitchen manager was also interviewed during the observation day.
Insights and important data from the surveys:
- Understand and find out students’ eating habits.
- The student’s thoughts and their own contribution to reducing food waste.
- Information on how schools relate to sustainable food consumption.
- Current measures applied in schools to reduce food waste.
- Students’ opinions and thoughts about current school food.
- The kitchen staff’s planning and choice of menu.
- Students and staff’s technological knowledge.
Quotes from the interviews
“If I had to decide the school’s choice of food, I would probably choose dishes that the students actually want to eat and not make them just go to a fast-food restaurant instead.”
Student 14 years old
“If you take a little too much food, the kitchen staff will tell you to eat less so you can eat everything to avoid throwing away the food”
Student 13 years old
“If there is food left after lunch, we put the food in lunch boxes or we freeze until the next day’s lunch”
Kitchen staff
“We have a wish day every Monday when the children can vote on what food they want to eat on Mondays. However, it is quite complicated as we have to go through the answers and it requires time and energy “
Kitchen staff
Behavioral Personas
After collecting and analyzing all the data, we defined two types of behavior based on behavior that often appeared.
Your Choice app
Your choice gives the opportunity for students to participate and vote between 3 different suggestions per day on dishes they want the kitchen to serve each week.
The students feel that together with the kitchen staff they can influence the menu, which in turn creates a sense of belonging. The students get the dishes they want at the same time as the kitchen staff can adapt the dishes to the school’s resources and requirements, thus being able to offer nutritious, good, and varied dishes.
The goal of Your Choice is to also increase knowledge about sustainability while creating community among students to be able to together contribute to reducing food waste.
Students can easily log in and see which month and week they are voting for.
Students can vote between 3 different suggestions that the kitchen has decided in advance for both meat and vegetarian.
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