Xiaoyu (Anna) You
EASYFOOD
How might we help very busy international students to eat healthy in a more affordable way?
Today, it is becoming more common for people to attempt to establish a healthier diet. However, many of the same people who want a healthier diet tend to eat in a simple and efficient ways, because they are so short on time. Most young people choose fast food and takeout instead of cooking meals themselves, which makes eating an expensive necessity. Many people believe that cooking is a time-consuming activity: Easyfood intends to change their opinion.
Easyfood is an app that helps users not only save money and time while cooking, but also guides them to eat healthier. This app works as a nutritionist and a kitchen guide at home, allowing users to customize their eating goals and menu options. The smart guide will provide notifications based on their eating schedule, which helps them maintain regular eating habits. At the same time, they can quickly get recommendations for meals based on the freshness of food in their fridge and their eating preferences.
Users do not need to worry about food preparation without guidance thanks to this app; instead, they have the option of planning and following a guide. Users can also find data on their personal eating habits and track progress towards goals after preparing and eating each meal in a day.
With Easyfood, users can also be introduced to social eating habits, by allowing them to split bills together with their friends or nearby users to save money on online grocery shopping, or by eating and cooking collaboratively. These options have the potential to make purchasing and cooking food become a more fulfilling social activity in the future.
Insight
After conducting interviews, I found five main insights: first is that most international students cannot buy what they want in nearby local supermarkets. They always need travel far to do grocery shopping. Second, unnecessary food waste is caused when they purchase too much, in an attempt to reduce the number of long distance trips for food. Third is that many of them have poor cooking skills that cannot support sufficiently healthy eating habits. Fourth is that their time is very limited: most international students indicated that they have too many assignments to do during final exam periods, and that this causes them to not have enough time to cook. Finally, several interviewees reported that they cannot achieve a good diversity of diet or nutritional balance when they cook alone.
Idea
Easyfood has four main functions: first, it incentivizes creation of a large cooking community. Users can create their daily menus based on recommended recipes, which meet individual requirements, and set up goals and missions on their profile page. These recommended recipes can be updated based on their goals, so users can easily customize their preferences for a healthy menu. They can also check their personal eating report on the profile page.
Second, the app also connects grocery shopping to communal eating: users can buy in groups and split bills together in a convenient and incentivized fashion, and in sensible contexts such as when hosting a party. When a person lives alone, they can find nearby users to split bills with, and not only split delivery fees, but also use counts earned through the app to save more money and avoid worrying about high delivery costs. If they use the menu recommendation in the community page, they will notice that they can also shop for groceries and cook simultaneously. The recipe will provide ingredients lists, choices of how many people to serve, and which ingredients they do not have at home. After adding to the shopping cart, these ingredients will automatically be added to the grocery shopping page. This can save them significant time when shopping for groceries at home.
Third, users can track food priority based on a classification of freshness and the best-before date. The menu recommendations will also show here during meal times, connect with the smart guide, and allow users to receive notifications to remind them to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at planned times.
Finally, the profile page works as a nutritionist, allowing users to set goals and get some feedback in their eating report.
Impact
Easyfood will improve the efficiency of grocery shopping and meal preparation: it will impact an audience of people who have unhealthy eating habits and are burdened with little free time to eat healthier and start preparing meals without the need to take extra time to learn how. Easyfood also introduces a social element to meal preparation and grocery purchasing, allowing groups of people to easily cook and eat healthy meals with their friends. It will make healthy grocery shopping, meal preparation and eating into a more incentivized and rewarding social activity in the future.
