Scraps

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Project Overview

College marks the period when many begin their journey of learning to cook and manage their meals regularly for the first time. Balancing academic responsibilities and other commitments poses a challenge for undergraduate students, making it difficult to consistently prepare healthy meals, especially in a safe and proper manner. In response to the given prompt aimed at addressing challenges faced by undergraduate students, our team developed Scraps, a mobile application aimed to assist students in discovering new recipes based on available ingredients while encouraging sustainable and safe food habits. This initiative directly tackles our overarching problem: How might we make eating at home easier and safer for students inexperienced with cooking and food handling practices?”

Research Process & Findings

To understand what challenges college students face when it comes to cooking and handling food, we conducted a survey asking students about their habits and food safety knowledge. Our survey received 56 respondents total and we were able to gather insights on organizational habits and time constraints. Students expressed difficulties in finishing leftovers, with one respondent stating, “[One of my biggest challenges is] eating all of it since I only cook for myself. It’s hard to diversify my meals while still eating everything in my fridge”. Others struggled with utilizing perishable foods effectively, as one participant mentioned, “Sometimes when cooking, I run into not being able to use ingredients by the expiration date! Specifically with vegetables, if I don't properly store them they go bad so quickly!”.

A notable finding revealed that 51% of respondents never properly label or date leftovers before storage. A vast majority of students also described forgetfulness as an obstacle. Many students forget what they have in their fridge or pantry, and these items end up spoiling before they remember. Considering this, our team identified the need to prioritize a feature within our application to track food items and their expiration dates.

Lastly, we found another commonality among respondents, which was a lack of food education. Many admitted that they had never received proper education on how to safely prepare and handle food, nor do they spend the time to educate themselves on such topics. When rating the extent of their knowledge on food safety, students rated an average of below 3, with 1 indicating a complete lack of knowledge and 5 indicating being very knowledgeable. To add on, a whopping majority of students—over 90% of respondents—admitted that more food safety education and awareness are needed among college students.

In addition to our findings, we conducted a quick competitive analysis of other food-related apps to scope possible existing solutions to these pain points. We discovered that while a few existing applications shared similarities with our proposed solutions, none provided all these features on a single platform. We also took a look at grocery store apps such as Doordash and Safeway to learn about how foods are commonly categorized.

To gather insights on food safety handling and guidance, we examined the infographic posts shared on our UC Davis student pantry's Instagram page. We identified concerns related to leaving food unattended for extended periods, understanding the elevated risk of bacterial growth and potential infection. Recognizing this issue, we wanted to implement setting reminders for students to store food in their fridge properly and discard old, expired items as soon as possible.

Survey form: Link UC Davis Pantry Instagram: Link

Design Process

After conducting user research, we created an affinity map to synthesize our findings and remedy the most common pain points among students.

A majority of students blamed forgetfulness on their food waste—specifically students have issues keeping track of what’s in their fridge or pantry. Students also had issues with organizational and management habits. Many do not label expiration dates on their food and end up purchasing too many items to use before they spoil. To address these issues, we designed a storage feature that tracks students’ food inventory. This feature also keeps track of items’ expiration dates, and if an item lacks one, the feature can estimate the amount of time before a food is likely to spoil. Students have the flexibility to enter food items that they purchase at the grocery store, or even foods they have cooked themselves. This feature was designed to help students keep track of their inventory, encouraging them to effectively meal-prep, purchase the right amount of groceries, and to practice safe eating habits by avoiding the consumption of spoiled foods.

One significant change after usability testing was redesigning the organizational structure of the storage. Initially, all of the items were listed, uncategorized by category. However, a user complained that they have many items in their fridge, and this structure would lead to an even longer list than what our designs had shown. To prevent cognitive overload, we organized the list of all items by food category, marked each item with a visual indicating its category, and previewed a maximum of 3 items within each to avoid an overly long list. Students can view every item within a category by pressing “View All”.

Another major pain point was time constraints—students struggle to shop for groceries, cook proper meals, and use up their ingredients because they lack time. To streamline the process of making meals, we implemented features designed to help students find convenient and easy recipes fast. Right when students open the app, recipes are suggested based on ingredients the student already possesses, as well as which ingredients are about to spoil. This encourages students to effectively use up their food. The recipes page also allows students to browse and filter through recipes, whether by time or ease level, and are interactive with the app’s storage feature (after cooking a recipe, users are prompted to add to the storage, and the ingredients used in the recipe are deleted from storage as well). Our app’s emphasis on making recipes easy to find and personalized to the students’ inventory saves time in finding quick and easy recipes, while reducing food waste.

Lastly, many students showed signs of lacking proper food handling education, and over 90% agreed that food education is needed for college students. To address this educational issue, we designed a food safety guide feature, where students can look up concerns and tips about food safety. Combatting conflicting information online and creating a simple, easy-to-access, and centralized educational resource for inexperienced students was our solution to promoting safe food-handling and eating habits in students.

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