At first, I was quite shocked about it, knowing that my dearest country is one of the largest food wasters in the world. It’s such a big problem that has relatively been paid little attention to. How can we let so much food go to waste when lots of people around us go hungry every day? Not to mention the environmental impact of food waste. Thus, after thinking about it for a while, I thought this would be an interesting topic to explore, so why not give it a try?

I did some research on what causes this food waste in the first place, some of the articles said that it happens mainly at the production stage due to insufficient skills, natural calamities, lack of proper infrastructure, and poor practices. While on the other side, food waste can also happen due to oversupply in markets. Retailers also tend to reject a lot of food because it doesn’t conform to their quality and aesthetic standards. According to FAO reports, nearly one-third of all food produced in the world for human consumption does not find its way to our tables. Can you imagine that?

Once this food gets to the landfill, it then generates methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times as potent as CO2 in trapping heat within our atmosphere. Which can cause global warming and climate change.

To stop food waste, changes have to be brought in at every stage of the process — from farmers and food processors to supermarkets and individual customers. As a first step, priority should be given to balancing production with demand. This essentially translates to lesser use of natural resources to produce food, which is not needed.

Secondly, more effort should go into developing better food harvesting, storing, processing, and distributing processes. If oversupply happens, steps should be taken to redistribute the food or to divert it to people who are in need.

Third, Large restaurants, supermarkets, retail outlets, and individual consumers can also reduce their food footprint by identifying where waste occurs and taking steps to tackle that food waste.

Aha! moment: So why not create an app that connects all of these food retailers who have oversupplied products/ surplus food with customers who want to help reduce this food waste at a discounted price?

So that’s how I came up with this idea as the core problem. After that, we (as a team) deep-dived into the design thinking framework and discuss our future plan.

During this stage, we try to empathize deeply with the people we’re designing this for so that we can understand their needs, thoughts, emotions, and motivations. In this case, we chose in-depth interviews (IDI). 3 things we prepared in advance before the research itself, from choosing the Research Goals, Research Objectives, and Research Questions.

From the process above, we’ll get a deeper understanding of the people we’re designing this for. I hope that we’re solving the right problem. It’s also very helpful to adopt the mindset of a beginner. This means we always left our own assumptions and experiences behind when making observations.

Before we started this project, there were some competitors solving a similar problem in or outside Indonesia. So we take a look at those competitors:

All of these competitors have one common solution to food waste, which is to help retailers to reduce their surplus foods/products and let customers buy them at a discount price. Quite an interesting business model that connects both users. Plus, there’s an environmental impact if this idea happens successfully. It’s a Win-Win solution!

But wait, if all of these scenarios work seamlessly, why is this app (especially Damago & Surplus) not popular in Indonesia? below is the story of finding it out.

From the results of in-depth interviews, we compiled all points and classified them accordingly to their similarity. Then we found some findings & insights. This helped us brainstorm, develop potential ideas, and gave a clear view of what was important to users and what was not while keeping in mind the objectives.

Customer mindset shifted because of food-delivery apps, People want to buy food through apps because of the convenience (which means they don’t have to go to the restaurant and pick it up by themselves). While most food rescue apps only provide self-pick-up service.

They like the idea of discount/promo coupons to get cheaper foods in food delivery apps. But too many terms & conditions make it complicated.

They often do not end up getting the food promos because of the limited slots available. They want to stay up-to-date with the newest food promos.

They want to help reduce food waste, but sometimes they don’t necessarily need the food, or proximity to the food retail stores is too far away.

People tend to think that surplus food is leftover food.

Limited information about the restaurants where they buy food. They need to know if it’s halal or vegetarian.

Low awareness of food loss and waste in Indonesia.

Provide delivery services for food rescue apps.

Food rescue app with discount surplus food.

The notification feature will remind them every time their favorite restaurants have surplus foods with discount prices.

Food stock update in real-time so that user can check how many foods are available.

Donation feature, so they can help to buy surplus food and donate it to people in need.

Review system in which they can check the quality of the foods they want to buy.

Food Labels for every restaurant, whether it’s halal or vegetarian.

Digital Badge/Trophy to encourage and motivate the users in reducing food waste.

This logo should feel environmentally friendly and have something related to food, as the goal of this product is to tackle the food waste problem in Indonesia. So I choose an earth vector and a plate with a fork and spoon beside it. I also applied some table etiquette elements inside the logo to make it more meaningful.

Then for the name, I came up with something simple yet quirky.

And finally, I combined and simplified it into ‘JagaBumi’ which is an Indonesian word for ‘to take care of the earth’.

By using the solutions from the brainstorming session, then we proceeded to create a sitemap, where we arranged and organized all the features and overall navigation of this app.

Then, I started the wireframe process with some quick sketches to establish the overall layout and content flow.

The overall layout will be minimal and straightforward to provide users a seamless and easy experience while using the apps. Rescuing food shouldn’t be that hard.

I approached some of the participants directly using Zoom meetings for the Usability Testing, this will help validate the design and whether it’s useful, understandable, and easy to use.

According to the participants, the flow of this app is really straightforward. They didn’t find any real blocker or difficulty when doing the UT tasks, but they did give some input for future improvements.

So that’s all of the processes from defining a problem to creating a prototype. Thanks to the Wiro Sableng team and Binar Academy for this opportunity! I would definitely say that I enjoy doing this so so much! Personally, I learned a lot during this process. Btw, thank you for reading this article! Hope this design case study can be useful, hope you can get some insights from what I was doing in this project. Below, I also want to share with you some of my learnings.

Know your scope. There are many frameworks and tools that can be used to facilitate the brainstorming and design thinking process, but that does not mean you have to use every single tool. It all depends on the scope of the project and the team.

Set the priority. We wish we can do all the fancy features we can ever think of! But sometimes the timeline doesn’t say so. So it’s really important to set the priority and expectations at the very first (especially if you’re working on a team).

And the most important thing, empathize! Try to understand what’s the concern of your users, dig deeper and find the root problems. Sometimes the opportunity lay behind the stones.

Any feedback or suggestions are very welcomed for the improvement of this product. You can leave comments below or reach me personally by email :)

📧 vp.mulia888@gmail.com