Foodopt

Inspiration

The Covid-19 crisis has surfaced a great dilemma between Economy v. Humanity. But we at Foodopt believe that this is an opportunity for us to have the economy and humanity go hand in hand. With this underlying thought we wish to promote 'Conscious Consumerism' towards the consumers and help them feel 'normal' as we fight through the pandemic. For the small organic farmers, we believe these efforts will help sustain the wealth and jobs generation in rural areas. But more importantly, we wish to help the small scale farmers avoid overproduction & food wastage. Include the consumers in rewarding those that are making efforts to use environment-friendly cultivation techniques. The understanding of the farmer's effort comes much better by being part of the process. Keeping user-centricity at the centre will help add value to our efforts for 'getting back to normal'.

What it does

Foodopt is a platform for consumers to adopt and buy fresh organic produce from local farmers that gets delivered at their doorstep.

The platform offers two options Direct Buying and Adoption (of a part of farmer's farm). With Direct Buying you can choose the produce that you want, from a list of farmer in your vicinity. The produce will be delivered at your doorstep in the shortest time available (24-48hrs) With Adoption you can choose to adopt ** a tree, an animal, a beehive** or a part of garden. The farmer will grow the produce, and upon completion a basket of fresh produce, straight from your adoptee, will be delivered at your door. During this tenure of adoption you will also receive an adoption certificate and documented updates from the farmer who's taking care of your adoption.

Present on the website is, also, a blog, 'The Experience Farm', that serves as a place for connecting with a farmer's life on farms, through photographs, livestream videos and interactive videos.

How we built it

The process started at

1. Defining the problem | How May We help small scale organic farmers to stay in connect with their consumers; help the consumers connect with organic farmers to find food that they prefer
2. Understanding the pain points and aspirations of the stakeholders (consumers and farmers).
3. Developing a persona.
4. Creating a service offering.
5. Validating our service offering through interviews with stakeholders.
6. Solution re-design.
7. Developing a Business Model Canvas
8. Defining go-to market strategies and the marketing channels
9. Cost & Revenue models

Having completed all these steps, we built the Information Architecture (IA), for a two-part website as Foodopt's interface; for the farmer and the consumer. The farmer's interface showcases a 'dashboard with all the relevant information present'. If wanted, each information can be seen individually (Bento Box Information Architecture Model). The consumers interface is a combination of different IAs, essentially Nested and Filter View IA Model.

We converted this IA to wireframes, followed by a Figma prototype showcasing the UX and UI of the service. You can check out the prototype with the link given here: link

Challenges we ran into

Need more time to analyse and define cost structure and revenue models. Assistance required with solving supply chain intricacies. Getting creative (experience) in defining more go-to market strategies. It would be useful to have assistance. With more time, the user experience details can be refined and tuned to the users. Most importantly, we need to either develop tech development capacity or onboard team member(s) with those capabilities :)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To be able to: Design a sustainable business model, that cultures altruistic humanitarian values. Keep the business model canvas simple, even though with all the possible additions we had in our mind; now pushed ahead for v2.0 of Foodopt. Keep the user-centricity at the centre of our design process and output.

What we learned

We are not the only ones to think of the small scale business owners as the customer segment. Therefore, it is not important to create another solution that functions; it is important to have a solution that brings meaning to the user(s).

What's next for Foodopt

We have defined a roadmap for the future of 'Foodopt'. It details the steps we need to take, which includes roll-out through development of the website and planning of go-to market strategies.

Some of the go-to market strategies that we intend to use are:

1. Distribution of safety masks: Print masks with Foodopt logo printed on them and deliver them at places where they are needed. The manufacturing and printing will be done in collaboration will local mask manufacturers.
2. Do you Know Your Food Challenge: We will create a series of 'interactive videos' of farm activities. User has to make the right choices to reach the end of the activity video. Winners get discount coupons for orders/adoptions on Foodopt. With this challenge, we intend to gather a user database for 'consumer' side of the platform.
3. FB/Insta Ads: With a persona to define the target audience on FB/Insta ads, we will leverage The Experience Farm to promote agricultural activities shared by farmers on the blog. To engage and educate people about farming and agriculture.

Then in Phase 1, we intend to roll-out the service in Italy. We will use the data gathered to augment and maintain the website.

Based on the success rate, in Phase 2, we will adapt the website for different EU countries and and also start the development for building an 'app' of Foodopt.

Built With

• figma