Nomo — Anna Nonaka

Overview

Nomo is a fictional brand that aims to combat the food waste issue in the world. The challenge is to build a product that can help fresh food business owners to reduce their ecological footprint and establish a long term balance for food supply and demand.

Our task was to apply the Double Diamond approach to design and build an effective and fun web application for fresh food business owners.

The project is a part of Le Wagon Tokyo Web Development coding bootcamp.

Role

Product Designer

Researcher

Full-stack Developer

Timeline

August 2021 - September 2021

Design Process

Double Diamond

Discover

We targeted small/medium fresh food business owners for our product, and we interviewed them on how they manage their supply and demand.

The goal was to investigate what struggles they face and how they are currently tackling them.

Voices of Interviewees

“We ask regular customers to pre-order so that we can predict how much to prepare to some extent.”

- Small cafe/bakery owner

“We sometimes put some discount 30 minutes before closing, but not many customers know about it.”

- Small guest house owner

“We try to predict how much ingredients to stock up based on the previous day’s left-overs.”

- Small grocery store owner

“Because we try to manage our ingredients well, we limit the menu size to only a few dishes.”

- Small guest house owner

“We tried to incorporate a prediction model for ingredients but too busy to work on it.“

- Medium grocery store manager

“We have asked food bank if they accept our left-overs but they wanted long-lasting, dry food.”

- Small restaurant owner

Define

After gathering insights from small/medium fresh food business owners, two major findings were revealed;

① Our target audience tries to reduce food waste in several ways

② Despite their efforts, they cannot avoid daily food waste

Problem Definition

Fresh food business owners need an effective and sustainable way to manage their ingredients to run a profitable business and make a better ecological impact in the world.

Develop

For the defined problem, we came up with several solutions, namely as follows;

1) effective inventory management system and 2) marketplace to distribute soon-to-be wasted food and green action dashboard.

1) Effective inventory management system

By registering how much and what ingredients are needed for each product, the solution **automatically calculate and suggest what ingredients to be ordered by creating a list** as well as **analyze the food-waste trend of the business**. Eventually we aim to connect the solution to the shop’s POS system so that all will be automated.

2) Marketplace to distribute soon-to-be wasted food and green action dashboard

Creating a marketplace solution **to match with people who are interested in rescuing the soon-to-be wasted food** so that the food can be distributed and waste to be avoided. In addition, to motivate the business owners, a **green action dashboard** is installed, displaying saved Co2 levels and waste statistics.

Deliver

Between the two solutions, we considered what is the best for our business, our user, and our technical team, in order to investigate which solution should provide a successful product.

As a result, we decided to go for the second solution - 2) Marketplace to distribute soon-to-be wasted food and green action dashboard.

The first solution was not selected due to the need for more technical resources as well as for a working infrastructure at each shop for the product to function well.