Nestle

I'm currently working on with a local team at Stanford and an international team at Paris. We were examining ways to make culinary aids and the overall food shopping experience much more engaging. Our dark-horse prototype* focused specifically on the inspiration and shopping phase of the overall cooking experience.

Quick-turn prototype of shelves that could suggest recipes while the
user took items off the shelf

User-Centric Design

One of the habits we looked at was the act of going to the pantry, examining the contents, leaving, and then coming back to the pantry later and examining once more. We think that this is an action that people do when they’re seeking for food and perhaps inspiration to cook something; however, when they return to the fridge, they’ll inevitably find out that nothing has changed.

So we had an idea in which we had a self-organizing fridge that could re-group ingredients to suggest recipes for the user. This would be valuable for the user because it could give them a new perspective on the contents of their fridge while giving them access to an itemized list of their fridge while grocery shopping. On the other hand, these digitized inventories would give Nestle invaluable data about the products that people buy, have, or perhaps don’t have, helping them examine trends in people’s specific purchasing habits. However, one key issue when proposing this dark horse was that an organizable fridge would not be very useful for the user, who we’ve identified to have only a small inventory to begin with. We decided to move this idea of a physical recipe suggestion tool to the grocery market.

The focus of our dark horse prototype is about creating an interaction between users and their food choices. By examining the shopping experience in the grocery store, we can tap into a routine and pain point of users and hopefully inspire them to cook different recipes in an easy and interactive manner.

The Design Vision and User-guided Iterations

The idea was to have a shelf of goods that would detect what ingredients or food items users would choose and then suggest recipe or ingredient additions based on their choices. Having this in the store or pantry would easily integrate it into the routine of people’s shopping and having suggestions for the user would help ease the difficulties of deciding what to cook or eat.

Initially, it was just a shelf that would light up recipes depending on the items you took off; however, as we added more user testing, we added more features such as instructions, recipe titles, video recipe views, and even recipe printouts. Although it may seem intuitive to just pick items off the shelf, it really makes a difference in user interaction and streamlining by adding the phrase "Start by picking up an item."

With the prototype, we wanted to ask whether or not giving active guidance to a shopper during the shopping phase will help them figure out what they want to eat or inspiration for what they could cook.
It could be argued that reading an online guide, cookbook, or even a chef could help push an individual to become inspired, but what we’re testing is whether or not we could form a dialogue between the user and the shopping experience without a middleman.



*The idea of the Dark Horse prototype is to explore areas away from the center of our design focus - ideas that may not be the most plausible, but can give insight by thinking outside the box. As a high-risk, high-reward approach, the Dark Horse prototype helps with examining topics that we are unfamiliar with and directing us away from our prior assumptions about the project space.