We decided to tackle the issue of the food wasted on a daily basis in our college mess. We strongly believed that a lot of this wastage could be avoided.
Our college campus is situated along a river bank. The garbage of the entire campus along with surrounding settlements is all dumped along the river banksThis garbage gets washed away downstream only during the monsoons.
And this happens DAILY!!!
The biggest source of food wastage was unsurprisingly the food that people leave behind in their plate. The reasons mainly being misjudgement of how hungry they were and just not liking the taste. So in order to best undestand where we could intervene in order to reduce the overall wastage of food, we charted out general food flow right from the time the raw materials are transported till the time the leftovers are thrown away into the river!
Food Flow
Design directions we reached upon after our research with the students and the mess staff
We needed to come up with a multi-pronged approach to tackle these issues. We categorised our initial brainstorming of concepts into groups based upon what specific issue they were targeted to tackle. We later connected these concepts across categories based on which of them could be merged together. So the following were our final set of concepts to tackle the wastage of food.
The main reason why people overserved was large volumes of the partitios in the eating trays. We thus suggested to reduce the overall volumes of the partitions in the plates, which would lead to people serving lesser food in the first serving. We also provided with partitions which shared the same base as the main serving section considering the eating habits of most Indians, where the vegetable is mixed with every morsel of roti and/or rice allowing easy mixing of food.
The students had no say in deciding the menu and there was lack of ineteraction between the students and the mess staff. We suggested the formation of a mess council that would consist of student representatives who along with the mess staff could decide the menu on a monthly basis. The council would also ensure constant feedback and dialogue between the students and the mess staff. We charted out the general workings of this mess council (pic above).
People would sometimes serve themselves with something not knowing the ingredients, and waste it later having not liked it. We prototyped this concept where the general taste of the item could be indicated on the name tag of every food item. This could serve as a warning and allow a better informed decision. These tags were helpful!
The mess had a system where in one of the staff members would take your plate and empt the waste into the bin. We suggested a change where in the students have to empty their own plates into the bin. The anticipated embarassment and guilt of throwing away the food in their plates made the students want to finish whatever they had served themselves!
There was considerable less wastage on the days we executed this system.
