My Sous Chef

Saving the World, Starting in Your Kitchen

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To heal the world, it starts with us and our kitchen. My Sous Chef is an app designed to do exactly that with us, the users, in mind. It is a kitchen management tool with the main focus on reducing food waste by helping the user organize their kitchen and bringing to the forefront of our minds the foods that we forget about and end up throwing away. Saving you thousands of dollars yearly and reducing methane emissions globally.

My Role

As a UX/UI designer and researcher, my goal is to create an easily accessible kitchen management tool to help users keep their kitchen organized and alert when a food item is approaching its expiry date. This will help users easily plan for future meals according to what is already on hand to ensure nothing is forgotten or going to waste.

The Problem

One of the largest contributors of global food waste and pollution comes from the domestic home. In this post-Covid world, people are eating in more than ever. Those who have not had to eat in before have learned to cook but have yet to manage their kitchen inventory in a way that does not result in food waste. People are throwing away their hard earned money through spoiled or expired foods that get lost or forgotten in their kitchen.

The Goal

An easily accessible kitchen management tool will help users keep their kitchen organized and alert when a food item is approaching its expiry date. This will help users easily plan for future meals according to what is already on hand to ensure nothing is forgotten or going to waste.

Desired Results

People utilizing The Sous Chef will:

  • reduce food waste

  • reduce unnecessary purchases

  • Save money

On a larger/global scale:

  • Reduce global food waste

  • Reduce pollution from food waste

Ruth L. (Usability tester)

“I always try to minimize my food waste and also have been looking for ways to cut down on the number of times I open my refrigerator daily. This app would help with both efforts.”

So How might we

reduce food waste on a global scale?

  1. Restaurants have all kinds of tools to keep kitchens organized and inventories in check. - How might we bring that type of management tool to the domestic home?

  2. To maintain an organized kitchen and reduce unnecessary overstock -- How might we help people stay on track with their grocery shopping goals?

With the proper tools provided through an app, accessible on smartphones, consumer can:

  • save people money by helping people stay on track with their grocery shopping goals.

  • help people stay conscious of their personal kitchen inventory, reducing forgotten or expired foods.

  • find more ways to buy less and utilize what’s already on hand.

Screener Surveys -

I started to research this problem by using screener surveys to find out the root and depth of this issue.

The results of the screener survey showed that the most common reason for food to be thrown away is spoiling or expiring.

Survey results:

  • Almost 60% of surveyors go grocery shopping at least once a week.

  • 40% cook at home 3-4x a week

  • 33% cook at home everyday

  • 70% throw away food due to spoiling

  • 52% throw away food due to expiring

  • Expiration is the most common reason food is thrown out.

Personas

Our target user demographic was fairly broad — smartphone users between the ages of 20-40 that cook and manage their own kitchen. But from our screener survey results and user interviews, we were able to find our user persona. A specific subgroup of our target demographic that has the potential to benefit the most from our product.

Jenny, our user persona is a mom and the primary cook of her household with many other responsibilities. She leads a busy lifestyle and has little time to invest into complicated systems.

Some pain-points include:

  • hearing “What’s for dinner?” from her family,

  • taking mental inventory and grocery lists, sometimes on a scrap of paper that ends up getting lost, then she goes to the store and

  • sees sales and discounts tempting her to buy more items she may not potentially need,

  • feeling guilty and frustrated for foods that get wasted because she knows that’s also money being wasted.

Her goal would be to make use of the foods she has on hand and save the money that she would spend on more food that will inevitably go to waste.

— After the screener survey, I interviewed the best candidates from the screener survey to understand their pain points within their day-to-day that contribute to their kitchen management habits.

User Interviews

  • Who did I interview?

    • 6 people between the ages of 20-30.

      • 1 with a family of 4

      • 2 couples 

      • 1 single individual

    • All use the kitchen regularly and purchase groceries.

    • All interviewees cook and eat in 5-6x per week.

    • All showed interest in saving money and reducing food waste.

Interview questions included:

  • Lifestyle and home environment

  • Kitchen organization methods

  • Grocery shopping habits

  • Current habits that are not working

  • Dietary restrictions, health goals, food/meal aspirations

  • Time and availability

— To further understand our users and their pain points, I created an affinity map grouping together like responses.

Affinity Maps

Early Ideation Sketches

Early ideation sketches included many features that are perhaps for future releases. Of these ideas, the most pertinent and necessary features were pulled for the first iteration of the prototype.

Through user interviews, I observed that many users that had a household of more than 1, utilized grocery delivery services such as InstaCart or Amazon Fresh. In my early sketches this was a part of the app I wanted to integrate.

Other essential features that were discovered necessary through user interviews and screener surveys were meal planning tools and list making features aside from the basic inventory. These features proved to be a more essential component of the app.

Site Map & User Flows

After the initial sketches, I built a site map of the whole app’s current potential capabilities. The site map was followed by user flows of the potentially most used flow.

Sketches and Wireframes

I sketched the user flow of the login process, password retrieval, and the signup process. Then wireframes were created based on the sketches for the sign-in flow.

Guerilla Usability Testing

Before

Guerilla usability testing was used to find areas of vulnerability in the usability of the app.

Tasks:

  • Create an account.

  • Access the “Dry Goods” inventory.

Findings:

  • Clickable content is unclear.

  • Clipped Content is misconstrued as swipeable.

Recommendations:

  • Apply more drop shadows or some effect to emphasize clickable content.

  • Hide unnecessary options for guidance.

After

The Design System

I created a gray refrigerator logo on a blue background as my first logo of the My Sous Chef app.

While looking for other color inspirations related to food, this image of nail polishes inspired the color pallet I chose to go with. These colors made for a much more inviting and friendly splash screen and design.

I used a bold, fun font called Pacifico as my main logo font and kept the smaller subheading and body text fonts easy and neutral with the Times New Roman font.

I selected icons with the same friendly and cute aesthetic that the color pallet and logo expressed.

With the design system I was able to create my high fidelity screens on Figma.

High Fidelity Screens

Prototype

  • In partnership with grocery delivery services like Amazon Fresh or Instacart and partnerships with quality and health rating apps like Yuka, My Sous Chef can guide users to utilize these services for a better lifestyle.

  • This app can boost user confidence in wise spending and motivate environmental morale.

  • In a broader aspect, the success of this app can be measured by the fulfillment of its initial purpose of reducing food waste and its impact on the environment. The more users using My Sous Chef successfully, the greater the impact we can have in reducing the effects of food waste pollution.

Features intended for future releases include:

  • Partnerships with grocery delivery services, meal delivery services and subscriptions.

  • Calendar and scheduling integration with delivery, meal planning, and grocery trip dates tracking.

  • Partnerships with quality and health rating apps.

  • Online search engines for recipes.

  • Food waste tracker and savings tracker

  • Portion calculator

  • Easily accessible widgets for on-the-go access

  • Integration of mainstreamed barcode system

Reflections:

Though there are many competing apps already on the market for kitchen management/organizational aids, My Sous Chef combines the capabilities of multiple apps into one all-encompassing tool. This app has the potential to be a leading application in this category. 

Nevertheless, for its success, it needs continued research and with many data consuming capabilities it will be a challenge to develop such an app for uninterrupted user flows.

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