Foodwize is a food-tech startup that was born out of the necessity of co-working spaces and small companies to offer lunch and dinner options to their clients.
In 2019 an old friend told me that he wanted to create a connected canteen to provide local and ultra-fresh food to the co-working spaces he has been using for one year. In his opinion, the options offered were not good, and waiting for delivery required an extra level of planning that he didn’t have time to.
The project is user-oriented since the beginning before starting to design the solution, we launched a questionnaire to understand what the consumers think of the food experience in coworking spaces, and we interviewed managers of 2 co-working spaces (WeWork and spaces) to access the real market possibility. We found out that 75% out of 145 questionnaires were not happy with the existing options and all the companies expressed the unsustainable cost of having a cafeteria that could offer high-quality food.
Foodwize is a short circuit food service that offers local, ultra-fresh, and sustainable food, at a competitive price through a two-square-meter (2 m2) connected canteen. It creates a food community that will know who harvests their ingredients and who cooks their food, promoting the local economy when the users want to go to their restaurants.
Problem:
How to develop a canteen service that allows the users to get high quality, local, ultra-fresh food, in no time with the less contact possible.
Challenges:
- Budget. the solution must allow charging 12 Euros per full meal.
- Contactless. Hygiene-wise we need to assure the consumers that the least people possible were in contact with their food.
- Easy access. interviewed people said, they think delivery services are too slow for their life rhythm, Foodwize must be quicker than them
- Create a sense of community, promote our vendors.
Target audience
This startup has the particularity that needs to address 2 types of clients:
B2C
Professional People between 25-45, living in Paris, who mostly work from coworking spaces in their regular weekly schedule.
The interviewed people expressed the importance of flavor and ethics in their food, they are willing to pay a little bit more to ensure these values are present in their daily plates.
B2B
Hosts, Co-working spaces in which quality food service is one of the main requests from their consumers. And Small companies which by law are required to offer lunch options to their employees.
these 2 main clients are concerned about the cost of having an in-house food provider and the real state that it would take from them, that is why our solution is perfect for them.Roles and Responsabilities
UX/UI lead designer and Creative Director.
I am in charge of generating a cohesive service experience for the users. Based on the architecture designed by a systems engineer I developed a series of digital products that make the internal and external processes in the startup to be almost automated and easy to use. I lead the experience and brand design in parallel. Conductor user testing sessions and continue to be part of the planning for each product growth according to ti the user’s needs.
Let’s Feed them
I analyzed the service architecture and identified the main products to be developed in order to have a Minimum Viable Product. the answer was:
- A mobile app that allows the user to explore the canteen’s content and to open the canteen.
- A corporate website, to attract investors and communicate the idea of the startup
- Custom CMS to control the content of the website and the mobile application.
I created a navigation map of each product and the relation between them.
I did a wireframe in Google Slides, and user flows creating personas that would represent each user case. This wireframe was tested by 10 potential users in Paris, from 2 different we-work coworking spaces.
I created a High fidelity prototype, while the development team was preparing their working environment using Adobe XD. this prototype was tested by the whole team and a total of 12 potential users in France.
I followed up with the team, providing assets and supervising the UI development. After every sprint, our app and our website would have an internal testing session. once we got to a big milestone, we would invite external users to test the app, and give us feedback.
I made sure the main function of the app was the first thing our consumer can see when enters the app.
the information about the food and the cooks is easy to find, and once you enter your credit card in 3 steps you can have your food in front of you.
Simple feedback from the users in order to develop an ai that will help re-stock the fridges in an efficient way.
The corporate site is a simple “Presentation Card website” that will grow into a web app in which the consumers will be able to go into their profiles and check the live content of each fridge. Mobile first… ALWAYS!
The CMS is able to control all the content in the app. Including a web app that does the nutritional facts calculations and automatically fills the Database fields.
And one of the most exciting things was to design the experience between our canteen and the user, in which we partnered with an industrial designer to evaluate the flow of the experience and take decisions such as which way the door should open. And how with a LED logo we can communicate clearly with our consumers regarding the interaction with the door.
The 1st prototype was done and tested the app positively and the 1st canteen is being built at the moment.