Chef by Seeds

Chef by Seeds
Weekly Meal Kits
Learn about your harvest
Recipes Based on Weekly Harvest
Check next week's meal kit
Interactive cooking tutorial
Full-circle, zero waste cooking
Obtain Collectibles (Gamification)
Future Implementations - Possible collaboration with Caring House
Future Implementations - Live Class
Future Implementations - Premium Tier

Inspiration

Seeds have a mission to develop the capacity of young people to respect life, the earth, and each other through growing, cooking, and sharing food. Our project explores what can be done beyond in-person workshops by providing more opportunities for the Duke communities to learn how to cook and plant at the comfort of their own homes.

What it does

Chef is a mobile app created based around a weekly meal kit subscription that includes a step-by-step interactive cooking tutorial to enhance the learning experience. By scanning the QR Code on the meal kits, users will be provided with recommended recipes, interactive cooking tutorials and instructional videos based on ingredients harvested by Seeds.

Each week, a different theme and a star ingredient are highlighted based on the season’s harvest. Users are also able to know the harvest date and the Seed’s students or volunteers responsible for each ingredient.

To further seeds initiatives to respect the earth, we encourage users to pursue activities that uphold environmental values in their homes through buying locally and participating in full-circle, zero-waste cooking. After the completion of each recipe, we also provide the user with options to plant the ingredients, turn them into compost and prompt them to participate in the plant with Seeds volunteering efforts.

We also introduced a fun feature within the app to prompt users to continue their subscription, users are able to earn multiple ‘Gem’ within the app by subscribing to more boxes and scanning the QR Code, and also by completing various recipes. Each ‘Gem’ contains different benefits including vouchers and discounts for future subscriptions amongst many others.

Why Chef?

To further the Seeds mission, Chef brings the cooking experience to the homes of Duke communities. Our mobile app is designed with ease and comfort in mind, ensuring that the users have a fun and seamless experience of ordering our meal kit.

How we built it

Utilizing Whimsical, we first began by brainstorming our program and the design challenge. After settling on an idea that we all liked, we then created the flow for the mobile app and business hierarchy. Afterwards, we hopped on to Figma where we began creating the lo-fi wireframes together in real-time. Since we are in multiple time zones, we take turns in sleeping and divided the tasks accordingly, with different members doing the Photoshop Design mockup, branding, and mobile UI respectively. 

Challenges we ran into

Collaborating with others online
Distribution of tasks
The short timeframe, mixed with schoolwork
Unstable internet  Being in multiple timezones meant that we have to work asynchronously and communicate online. This is, obviously, not ideal as factors such as latency and unstable internet make communicating hard, which can, in turn, affect the end-product. Moreover, the short deadline forced us to choose which ideas need to be omitted in order to have a feasible MVP target.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to turn prospective ideas into a working design prototype in a short time period
Being able to brainstorm ideas as a team and making it happen
Being able to coordinate relatively well asynchronously
Finishing our project despite technical hurdles and the very limited timeframe

What we learned 

We learned that we can turn a liability into an advantage. Since we are in opposite time zones, each of us has specific tasks that we need to do while the others are sleeping. Hence, we managed to use each hour in effectively without any downtime since we take turns in sleeping.

What's next for Chef by Seeds

Possible collaboration with Caring House: This collaborative idea with Caring House means that Chef by Seeds can provide fresh produce and recipes for the patients at Duke Cancer Institute to cook. This collaboration is a fun way to expand the program while bringing fun and delicious food to the local Duke Residents who reside in Caring House.

Live Cooking Class: This weekly event can be done in collaboration with local Duke chefs that wants to participate. This way, users can interact live with the chef and ask questions while they are cooking. It’s a fun way to contribute to the community while still retaining Seed’s mission.