Case Study on Managing Food Wastage in College Mess

DISCOVER

How it started.

I was having just another busy day is college. As I was running late for a class, I noticed this sign in the mess. It’s a board that tells how much mess food was wasted the previous day. Weirdly enough the board only guilt trips us and doesn’t really do much to stop it and that got me thinking.

As any sane designer would do, I bunked that class and sat to ideate a solution for this.

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

I read a few articles on reasons why people waste food or throw food away. Then I spoke to a few college friends asking them why they waste food in the mess. I found food in our mess is usually wasted because it is made in excess or because people don’t get the food they want and end up throwing away the food they get. After gathering enough knowledge about the motivation behind wasting food, I conducted a quick survey on google form and circulated it on a few college groups to confirm my assumptions. Here are the results:

What I learnt from the survey:

1. 80% people throw food away because of articles like hair, dirt etc in the food. Quality seemed to be a big concern.
2. 55% take too much food.
3. 100% of the people claimed they would waste less food if they got the food they preferred to eat.
4. If there was to exist an app people wanted a Menu option, credit system as well as QR code scanner instead of a manual Mess ID card.

A student manually searching for her Mess ID card

DEFINE

Problem Statement

College students waste a lot of food in the mess. Eventhough they are guilty about it, no one does anything about it. The entire mess management system is chaotic and unorganized. Moreover, since it isn’t digitalized, It’s time-consuming and in-effective leading students to miss meals, eat out and have a bad opinion about mess food in general.

Solution

The aim is to reduce the food wastage and digitalize the mess management system(App) to facilitate more effective and streamlined methods to save and serve food.

DESIGN PROCESS

Double Diamond

The two diamonds represent a process of exploring an issue more widely or deeply (divergent thinking) and then taking focused action (convergent thinking).It suggests that the design process should have four phases:

• Discover: Understand the issue rather than merely assuming it. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues.
• Define: The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help to define the challenge in a different way.
• Develop: Give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people.
• Deliver: Involves testing out different solutions at small-scale, rejecting those that will not work and improving the ones that will.

USER FLOW

LOW FIDILITY WIREFRAME

FINAL DETAILED SOLUTION (HIGH FIDILITY)

Menu Feature

Once you login to your account, you can select the food items you would like to have and pre-order it one day before. This ensures that the food items and the quantity are saved in the database and the staff can get a rough estimate of how much food to make the next day. The key is to cook smaller portions to avoid excessive leftovers. You will also get an alert about how much credits you are spending. This ensures you have a menu to choose from that is personalized and caters to your dietary needs.

QR code scanner

When you scan the QR code in the mess, your attendance will be marked in the database. This scanning will automatically place the order at the mess. You will receive a Token number as well. Finally, you wait for your order to be made and mess staff will call out your token number when it’s ready. This is much easier than manually searching for mess cards.

Swiping makes sure there is not much room for error and accidental ordering

Credit System

Each student is granted a few credit points in the beginning of the semester and each food item corresponds to a certain credit point. When you place the order, it automatically deducts the credits. At the end of the semester you will receive a collective credit score and you’ll have to pay only for those credits. You only pay for what you eat. Psychologically this makes you be more aware of the quantity of food you order (We know 55% people take too much food) because you feel like you are spending money on it and thus you’ll try to save it. We prefer to save money than save food.

Displays total credits and your history of credit usage

Feedback Page

Once you are done eating you can leave a feedback. This will go to the staff. They will view your feedback and make sure the quality is in check. This feature is very important as we learnt around 80% of the people throw away food due to lack of quality. You can attach an image or take a picture that supports your claims and concerns. The staff will listen to your grievances and reply to your feedback if necessary. This also ensures there is a record of all the feedback.

CONCLUSION

This solution solves most of the problems and concerns of the college students who eat in the mess. There are still many features that can be added but considering the current scenario of the mess management system, I find this solution to be the most feasible. Digitalization and setting up a basic App is the need of the hour. This design process is iterative so I will keep improvising on the design based on usability and feedback.