La Tendera

Inspiration

During the COVID19 outbreak we have witnesses chaotic scenes in supermarkets and food stores. Not knowing what lied ahead of us, we have rushed to buy compulsively what was available: from toilet paper to rice, there have been shortages in shops all over the world.
Small, local businesses are suffering the most from the change of habits during the COVID19 pandemic. On one hand, they are experiencing a increase in demand. In spite the positive news, the problem is that this demand is unpredictable. As a result, they do not know when to buy what. Moreover, few of these businesses are digitised. Therefore, managing the stock during this chaotic times is more difficult than ever. If nothing is done, these shops will soon be out of business. Our team was inspired to provide a solution for both consumers and small business owners because we all participate in the local economy. We have friends who own small shops, or live in countries like Mexico where informal food trade sustains millions of people. We are also experiencing from first hand the difficulty of planning our shopping for the entire family for days if not weeks. Limitation of movement is making things even harder, as we are not able to always shop where we used to. Let´s make this experience better for all, and not just during the COVID19, but for a long time afterwards.

What we learned

We interviewed over 50 customers and found out that they want to support their local shops and markets but also fear they do not follow sanitary rules as much as supermarkets do, so they have stopped shopping there. We also learned that consumers need help calculating the basket, so they can avoid going out as much as possible whilst also not producing food waste, hoarding food or running short of produce too early.
Therefore, we learned that we could add value by creating an application that: Show you on a map where the local food businesses are Helps you calculate your food basket based on how many people live in your home, for how long you want your basket to last (2 weeks maximum), your preferences when it comes to what food you like and / or recipies available Connect you with your local supplier so you can pick the basket on the day and time you want We believe the difficulty will be in calculating the right amount on food based on dietary recommendations, preferences, weight etc. However, this is something we will learn as we get more behavioural data in the app

How we built it

We designed the whole product in less than 40 hours. Started from scratch and thanks to the diverse team skills we delivered pretty quick and accurately. Experts in Product management, design thinking, project management, branding, ux design and web/app developer were part of the team. We managed to deliver a quick MVP, yet It was very rewarding to be able to work together on fighting against the Covid-19 and support local businesses. We are looking forward to accomplishing next steps to bring it to the market. We envisioned and developed ideas through design thinking and UX design processes. A survey gave us valuable insights and proved the interest of the market. We built the product based on low code development and a cloud-based platform.

Challenges we ran into

Mainly challenge we faced was working remotely. At first it was a bit of a challenge mainly because we didn’t know each other, but we quickly adapted to the new situation, stablished roles and work-flows so as to speed up our outcome. It was a success facing and solving challenges together and we are looking forward to the next ones to come.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Thinking globally and do locally

What's next for La Tendera

We expect to receive help to make our solution available for free for small store around our communities

Built With

• appsheet
• google-cloud
• google-suite