A Business + Product Design project to improve healthy eating in Food Desert area.
Project Partner: Yilin Lu
Food Desert is an area where healthy food is difficult to obtain. Most of the time we believe that Physical Access is the main reason for the forming of food desert. But our research found that there're deeper causes for this national problem.
The two deeper reasons for Food Desert is Cost and Behavioral Barrier. Even if there's a Fresh Grocer right nextdoor, it's still too expensive for the low-income family to get fresh produce.
Further, many residents in low-income communities (especially younger generation) have already formed the unhealthy eating habit. It could be really hard for them to change it.
Among all the reasons, Cost is the biggest one. So the mission of our project is to provide cheap healthy produce to these families living in food desert areas.
In order to achieve the low price, we've identified two opportunities:
First one is the price fluctuation of produce. As shown in the graph above, each type of produce has its own price fluctuation curve. If we could keep track of the curve and pick up the produce that's on it's lowest price, we would be able to achieve the goal. (Graph from https://makanaka.wordpress.com/tag/wholesale/)
Second opportunity is the excess produce from farmer's market. Every day each farmer's market creates a decent amount of left-over produce which are totally fresh and edible. Many farmers prefer to donate them for the sake of saving effort. There's great opportunity for us to collect these excess produce from them at a very low price.
Based on these two opportunities, we designed our service:
The carrier design is currently in progress.
In terms of the business model, the service will run as individual-owned small business for 1-2 years in Philadelphia area. After building up the brand, we would start franchising to expand the business to other cities and states.
