CLIENT PROJECT
PRODUCT INCUBATOR
Boosting profits & advancing sustainable business practices by crafting a platform to upcycle wasted food resources into desirable retail products
KEY SKILLS
Qualitative Research
UX Design & Prototyping
THE CLIENT
Moving Feast, a collective of food-system social enterprises across Victoria
MY ROLE
UX Designer and Researcher at STREAT (a member of Moving Feast)
THE BACKSTORY
Moving Feast is a network of social enterprises on a mission to build a fair, regenerative and connected food system. A huge part of this mission is reducing food waste, which contributes three times the yearly emissions of all global aviation.
After conducting an audit and discovering that Moving Feast creates 100+ tonnes of waste each year, the organisation secured a grant from CEBIC to explore circular business opportunities, creating a challenge…
Moving Feast’s many roles across the food system
THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE
How might we turn Moving Feast’s wasted resources into a circular business opportunity that both generates profit and tackles food waste?
The grant comes with a few notable constraints: to maintain funding, the project has operate with a limited team in order to stay on budget, and create a solution that balances circularity and business viability
THE SOLUTION
A web-based tool for upcycling excess food-systems resources into desirable retail products
Diversify product selections to manage risk via portfolio analytics
Compare product ideas to find the best fit for each business
Capture and vet product ideas from across the collective
THE PROCESS
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
To understand Moving Feast’s supply chain, wasted resources, and production capacities, we interviewed operations teams at each of the 7 core businesses
Our interviews exposed key challenges in product production and waste upcycling, including:
Siloed product development process
Moving Feast’s operations teams typically make product development decisions, yet they’re often removed from actual production, where waste is actually visible. The result? Many viable waste materials go unnoticed and unconsidered for upcycling
Limited time, staff, and funds to test new initiatives
Moving Feast staff expressed keen interest in upcycling resources, but felt fully occupied running their businesses as is and reported lacking the bandwidth to innovate
Decentralised teams limit collaboration and innovation sharing
Irregular contact between certain Moving Feast teams keeps helpful waste initiatives from spreading through the collective, lessening their impact and dampening innovation
After further analysing these challenges, we generated 3 concepts for turning them into business opportunities:
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Compost Upcycler
Take a low-effort, narrow-scope approach to upcycling by monitoring, sorting, and storing usable organic resources to revamp as high-value retail products
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Resource Exchange
Create a platform to help Moving Feast overcome decentralisation - share resources, equipment, and expertise so that wasted materials can be upcycled by the best-suited partner
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Product Incubator
Formalise and open-source the product development process - build a platform to communally collect, develop, and test upcycling ideas for Moving Feast’s wasted resources
We chose to explore the product incubator based on its scalability and low logistical requirements
Unlike the resource exchange, which involves the costs and logistical challenges of moving resources and equipment from place to place, the product incubator works with ideas and procedures, which are infinitely reproducible and easily shared.
The incubator also maximises the likelihood of developing winning products by sourcing and sharing ideas all across Moving Feast, unlike individual compost reviews, which keep innovations siloed within each business.
NARROWING SCOPE
Next, we explored how the barriers to including more wasted resources in Moving Feast’s product development process by charting Moving Feast’s existing process
We chose to prioritise the following challenges going forward:
Perceived tension between business practicality and circular practices (e.g. profitability vs. zero-waste production) stifles the creation and testing of circular-leaning products
Unclear standards around product viability make it difficult to argue for or adapt sustainability-focused products, which are sometimes dismissed as “values-focused instead of practical”
Existing ideas for upcycling waste materials aren’t making it into the product development process since most employees aren’t typically involved in product development, so even viable ideas aren’t turning into circular products
Through several rounds of ideation, we sought to overcome these challenges by focusing on the following objectives:
Creating shared value frameworks around product desirability and viability so that more employees can ideate waste-saving ideas that also work from a business perspective
Elevate sustainability’s status to match that of more established concerns like profitability to promote greener product development (possibly through quantifying environmental impact)
Opening the product ideation process up to more employees to benefit from their existing ideas and specialty knowledge around waste materials and customer preferences
DESIGN EXPLORATION
To implement this reimagined process, we started brainstorming a tool - one that was open to all, incentivised sustainable products, and supported complex decision-making
INITIAL EXPLORATIONS:
In generating these sketches, we explored the tipping point between supporting realistic decision-making through surfacing all relevant information, and avoiding overwhelm and disengagement by nesting and hiding the details.
The product cards are a key element of this design, as they summarise the product idea for quick comparison, but can be expanded to show more detail if the user needs more information to feel confident in their decisions.
REFINED WIREFRAMES
After nailing down the product cards, we decided on a multi-step tool that guided the user through the decision-heavy process of selecting specific waste for upcycling to choosing what retail products to turn this waste into to considering their selections as a cohort to ensure adequate production and shop capacity to actually sell these products in one season.
PROTOTYPE & TEST
With our tight budget and timeline in mind, we jumped into Airtable to rapidly prototype our concept
To test the prototype, we asked 4 Moving Feast members to use the form to add product ideas and select 5 products via the portfolio selection page. Our tests revealed:
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Overwhelm with the form’s length and lack of structure
tedious to submit multiple ideas
confusion around what to do if don’t know the answer to a question (e.g. projected wholesale price)
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Insufficient operational information for decision-making
need information on pricing, potential customers, wholesale vs. retail to deduce viability
share the unknowns, and let users ask for help fleshing out their product concepts
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Difficulty comparing and selecting product ideas
scannable, more visual cards preferred, with images and ratings
prefer less info upfront so it’s easier to compare products on a few critical criteria and eliminate unviable options quickly
ITERATE
To improve the tool, we went back to the drawing board to reconsider the product cards’ information hierarchies, as well as the entire portfolio selection page
Create quick access filters to decrease searching time and promote the most robust products - popular features include extended shelf life, low labour costs, small storage requirements, seasonally-based products, and previously tested products.
Enable holistic portfolio review within the building environment to help users spot if their portfolio is leaning too far towards certain characteristics and allow course-correction before the confirmation stage
Strengthen information hierarchy within product cards to improve comparability and clarify operational info, specifically prioritising operational metrics to support realistic decision-making (e.g. prototyping progress and projected profit), and featuring sustainability indicators like carbon impact and shelf stability
This refined prototype puts us in a strong position to court further funding to develop and launch the tool. In the meantime, the Airtable prototype will support further product idea collection, which can be transferred to the custom tool at a later date.
Design 2.0: The refined tool
The final portfolio selection screen features a prominent sorting and filtering panel to help each user groups prioritise products that suit their particular needs, alongside visual, scannable cards for quick comparison, and a ‘quick review’ popup that shows users which waste they have yet to select products for, and how their selections are shaping up as a comprehensive portfolio of products.
CONCLUSION
So far, we’ve logged several tons of wasted materials in the system, and amassed over 100 product ideas to make use of that specific waste, some of which are now progressing to prototyping and market testing.
This tool effectively establishes Moving Feast as an important player in the circular design movement and opens up new relationships with major circular organisations, who will likely act as future collaborators.
WHAT’S NEXT?
In future iterations, I would:
work with a developer to build and validate the web-based tool
build out the performance-tracking element of the tool to create a feedback loop that improves the viability and desirability framework over time
measure project success by
the number of waste-based products that make it to market and produce a regular profit across Moving Feast’s businesses
the % reduction in tonnes of waste and carbon emissions produced by Moving Feast each quarter
THANK YOU FOR READING
