Sneaky Eaters
Project Overview
A food waste campaign targeting college students with the aim of gradually correcting behavior that fosters food waste.
Project Type
UI/UX, Graphic Design
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Figma
Project Brief
Growing up in Indonesia, food is a form of celebration, comfort, and family. There's a saying," If you don't eat the rice it will cry!" and I think about this every time I see unfinished food. With environmental issues like food waste, this is an issue everyone is well aware of and contributes to daily. In the case of college students, the odds are stacked against them: this might be their first time living alone, eating at dining halls and learning how to meal plan. With this target audience in mind, I asked myself how I could evoke hope and empowerment in regards to reducing their food waste. The campaign, Sneaky Eaters, consists of 2D elements, 3D elements and an app.
Background
Inspiration
Due to my love for food I’ve been growing more conscious of my own food waste and of those around me. I grew up in Indonesia, where we are the second largest contributor to food waste globally (International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development), and yet we suffer from food insecurity simultaneously. Despite coming from a culture where food is highly valued, it pained me to see food wasted so easily.
Issue
According to the World Food Programme, over a third of all food is wasted each year. The three main causes of food waste are food spoilage, increased portions and overbuying.
Target Audience
I aim to target college students (age 18-24) who mainly go to all-you-can-eat university dining halls and have not learned how to plan and grocery shop for meals. Raising awareness with a younger audience ensures that the values and habits they pick up will continue to become a part of their routine as they grow up.
Campaign Name
I chose the name “sneaky eaters” to refer to raccoons as a symbol of resourcefulness. The name is playful and likely to evoke curiosity within my audience.
Angle
Since I am targeting college students, I want the mood to be very bright and hopeful in order to make a serious topic feel less overwhelming. The brand should feel a little fun to avoid feeling too clean and corporate.
Location
As college students are the target audience, I want to focus the roll-out of my campaign in spaces where students create decisions that lead to food waste. These spaces are the dining halls, grocery stores and kitchens.
Tone/Messaging
With the goal being to slowly shift and correct behavior that fosters food waste, the main message is to do your best. Cutting food waste out completely is unrealistic and difficult, and thus the tone of the campaign is not guilt but hope and empowerment.
Research
Secondary Research
Research: Food Waste
A third of the world’s food—1.3 billion tonnes—is wasted. (World Food Programme)The average American family of four throws out $1,600 a year in produce. Multiply that by the typical 18 years that a child lives at home and one could easily pay for a year’s worth of tuition at any number of America’s private colleges or universities. (Recycle Track Systems)
Research: College Students and Food Waste
College campuses nationwide produce 22 million pounds of food waste annually, according to the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC). They discovered that during the transitional time of young adulthood, many of the food management behaviors that might prevent food waste haven’t been learned yet or haven’t been necessary.
Secondary Research
Research: College Students
According to the Lumina Foundation:
1. 64% of college students work and 40% work full time.
2. 49% of college students are financially independent from their parents.
3. 57% of college students live independently away from their parents or campus housing.
4. 36% of college students reported not knowing where their next meal would come from.
5. 53% of college students come from families at or below twice the poverty level.
6. Tuition has increased 5 times more than inflation in the past 35 years.
Primary Research
For my primary research I interviewed six students at Northeastern. Based off the interviews, I created an affinity diagram to categorize the observations:
From my primary and secondary research I gathered that:
The three locations I wanted to target were dining halls, grocery stores and kitchens. These were the locations where students were tasked with making decisions that would impact their food waste
From conversations with students, I learned that they often felt overwhelmed and helpless with most environmental campaigns due to the amount of statistics. Thus, I wanted to evoke empowerment and hope through my campaign.
The odds are stacked against college students. With many working, living alone for the first time, and being financially independent, students need a resource to foster proper food management behavior.
Branding
Carrying out the branding of the campaign individually was a daunting task. It was my first time doing any brand identity work. However over the course of the semester, I continued to iterate and came to create a brand identity for Sneaky Eaters that I’m proud of.
Color Palette
With this color palette, I wanted to stray away from the greens and browns that have been heavily associated with environmental causes. Keeping the target audience of college students in mind, I wanted to use bright and bold colors. Thus I decided to use purple along with yellow and orange as accent colors.
Illustration
Prior to this project, I had never created illustrations for my brand identity. It was an intimidating task that took a lot of effort and time but ultimately became the center of my campaign. I wanted to create characters that were humorous and could be used in different contexts regarding food waste.
The illustration style is simple and playful to make college students curious and grab their attention. The raccoon appears as different characters to add variety to the campaign and gradually become recognizable. The raccoon appears as a detective, doctor, soccer referee, chef and dumpster diver! This rebrands raccoons who were previously seen as a nuisance to resourceful.
Logo and App Icon
The primary logo of this campaign is a raccoon! I chose this animal to symbolize resourcefulness and to evoke curiosity with a unique logo. The campaign mainly revolves around this raccoon!
Typeface
For my typeface I wanted to use a sans serif that I haven’t seen used regularly. I decided on DM Sans, a simple sans serif typeface. This typeface is easy to read, has many weights and feels friendly. The use of this single typeface across my campaign establishes a cohesive and easily recognizable brand identity.
Sneaky Eaters Campaign
Phase I: Dining Halls
With college students being my target audience, I’m rolling out my campaign at a prime location where the most food waste is generated on campus: dining halls. At dining halls, students can feel the need to fill up their plate to get their money’s worth. Additionally, with a buffet-style dining hall, students are easily enticed by the abundant options and fill up their plate quickly.
Food Displays
Text and imagery on the glass in front of the food display will make students think twice before taking food. The bright yellow slogans along with illustrations will easily capture students’ attention while browsing for food.
Dining Hall Plates
Having text and imagery on the dining hall plates will encourage students to think about how much food they take and to finish everything on their plate. The bright yellow border around the plate feels cheerful and the illustrations of the raccoon and its paw prints feel humorous.
Napkins
When students eat and use napkins, the imagery and text will remind them to try their best in doing their part to reduce food waste. The yellow grid reassembles a picnic blanket and makes the dark purple raccoon and its paw prints stand out!
Phase II: Grocery Stores + Kitchens
The next phase targets locations where students actively make choices that impact their food waste: grocery stores and kitchens. These campaign elements act as tools for students to utilize in order to regulate their food waste.
Grocery Tote Bag
Students can use this tote bag for groceries where the multiple compartments can help contain produce and prevent it from being crushed. The text and imagery on the outside will also encourage others customers to reduce their food waste by avoiding over-buying food.
Takeaway Container/Lunch Box
This container reminds students to bring home food from restaurants to save for another meal. Simultaneously, this reduces plastic waste from takeaway containers.
Grocery List Planner
The grocery list and meal planner ensures that students will only buy food needed for the week. Before shopping, students can plan out their meals for the week and the ingredients needed to make them. Then they can go into grocery stores knowing exactly what they need and avoid over-buying or impulse buying ingredients.
Phase III: Sneaky Eaters App
The last phase leads us to the Sneaky Eaters app. The app encourages students to incorporate better habits throughout every stage of making their own meals. This was my first time creating an app on my own from the ground up. It was interesting to see how the brand identity translated onto the screen. Before I started creating the app, I narrowed down what I wanted users to be able to accomplish using job stories.
Job Stories:
When a university student cooks at home they want to be able to cook meals they love so they're excited to eat
When a university student is planning out their meals, they want to have access to a variety of recipes, so they can have options to choose from
Before a university student goes grocery shopping, they want to be able to know what meals they want to cook so they can go in with a fixed and specific grocery list
When a university student buys their own groceries, they want to be able to find specific ingredients for their recipes so they can shop quickly and efficiently
When a university student is hungry, they want to know what meals they can make based off ingredients in their fridge, so they don’t have to stress about their next meal
Lo-Fi Prototype
This was the initial lo-fi prototype where the four main screens were discover, shopping list, fridge inventory and my account.
User Testing
After creating the lo-fi prototype, I conducted user testing where users would have to carry out these four tasks:
Add recipe to meal plan for lunch
Save a recipe to All Recipes board
Add ingredients to shopping list
Add ingredients from shopping list to fridge
Remove ingredients from fridge
From the user testing, I was able to pinpoint the specific problems with the user experience.
Disabled Buttons
There needed to be disabled states for buttons to ensure that the user would choose a board before saving a recipe.
Word Choice
Users were often confused between the "Add all missing ingredients to shopping list" and "Add ingredients to shopping list" buttons. Clear and concise wording is essential in the final iteration.
Add Screens
When removing ingredients from your fridge, there is no on-screen confirmation, leading to users pressing the button repeatedly
Here’s a link to the final prototype!
Reflection
Afterthoughts
Revisiting this project makes me feel proud. This topic is so personal to me and it’s been so fun to reflect on it for this case study. I remember being very harsh on myself during the development of the project because I felt like the issue of food waste had been tackled too many times. But I realized now that I love this project because it takes the approach of hope rather than guilt. While the topic was close to my heart, I went out of my comfort zone in creating an app and illustrating for the first time.
What I would have done differently
During the development of the app, I was able to do user testing to make improvements. I wish I also did the same for the other aspects of my campaign to get a better idea of how effective the branding and campaign elements were for my target audience. I established my branding very early on in the project and got positive feedback from my peers and professor but asking others for feedback would have been helpful. With the illustrations, could the raccoons be in different positions for variety? Is the tone of hope and empowerment effective? What would make college students care about food waste? These are questions that I wish I had explored during the ideation stage in order to have a clear intention behind each design decision.