MINI+ Market
Free Grocery Program within Local Stores
This is an HCI design intervention in alleviating food insecurity in children, targeting at the Tompkins County for this project for now until further scaling up. The system is designed by two masters and one undergrad at Cornell, implementing a new online application portal and an automated item-lookup text messaging system at local grocery stores to support free grocery programs for families with food insecurity. Each team member was involved in literature review, user research, ideation, design, prototyping, iterations, evaluation, and the final delivery.
The Problem
Food insecurity has long since been a health, economic, social, and even political issue in the United States alone. With COVID-19 resulting in the sharp rise of unemployment rates nationwide, food insecurity has now affected nearly 1 in 4 households as of this year, which includes over 18 million children not getting the food and nutrition they need for healthy development.
The Current State
Food insecurity relief programs are split into two major types: federally funded programs like SNAP and WIC, and local community solutions like food banks and pantries. Both have been essential to uplift communities and family negatively affected by COVID-19, but are also associated with a negative stigma.
The Solution
A program that integrates free ‘grocery stores’ within already existing grocery stores which encourage people to shop for food and necessities for their families and children as they work towards self-sufficiency and living healthier lives. For the semester, we are specifically focusing on partnering with GreenStar Co+op located in Ithaca, NY.
Existing Solutions
We focused on three major types of previous work that all revolved around reducing food insecurity.
Federal programs
Local solutions
Ithaca-focused interventions
Federal Programs
Common Local Solutions
Ithaca-Focused Interventions
Existing Free Grocery Stores
Analysis & Definition
Literature Insights
Interview Insights
Research Insights
Ideation
We started off knowing that we wanted to create something that would help with food insecurity in children. Tackling something of this sort seemed extraordinarily difficult when we first took on the idea because all we could think of was attempting to implement technology in a way where we could help the issue at hand. Technology presently has a place in this problem, but isn’t used effectively and isn’t necessarily the solution to the problem because of everything else involved (politics, economic, the pandemic, etc.).
Free Grocery Store?
We like the idea of a free grocery store because it was a concept that sounded so radical that few have attempted to try and make it work. After doing some more research, we realized that such systems do actually exist, so if we wanted to continue, we’d need to find ways to improve such systems and find our own unique place in the industry.
Concept Map
Storyboarding
Our of the entire concept map, we focused on designing the three circled aspects of the system design. Initial explorations of how these three steps would be executed were done through storyboarding.
Design Concept
MINI+ Market is your local non-profit that partners with local grocery stores to create free grocery stores within existing store you know and love. Free grocery stores are personalized to each partner and community they serve to provide local, fresh groceries for food insecure households without the stigma as families work towards self-sufficiency and living healthier lives.
We ultimately chose to focus on working with GreenStar due to their promotion of fresh and local produce and goods, as well as general focus on social impact. Our grocery store will be called "FLOWER+" to acknowledge the work GreenStar has done with FLOWER, their existing healthy food access discount prog ram. News of the store's opening will be advertised to current FLOWER program members as well as referred to through our community partners working with the underserved populations in TompkinsCounty.
Partnership Framework
Healthy foods are considered too expensive by many food-insecure families (70% in Tompkins County), so we sought to create a distribution model that would change this perception and increase access to local and healthy foods with Mini + Market's help.
Customer Journey
Food-insecure families have varying backgrounds in technological literacy. Therefore, we sought to lower barriers to entry to the MINI+ Market program by providing three main modalities to assist customers in their shopping journey: in-person, through a basic cell-phone, or online through a smartphone or desktop computer.
Implementation
To fulfill this design objective, we will walk through the 3 main steps in the customer journey in order to find and remove points of stigma. These three steps are: customer onboarding, shopping, and checkout.
Onboarding
In order for families to participate in the free grocery program, they have to first become a member of GreenStar. Users can apply either in-person or online.
We chose to focus on a website that could provide a lot of general information and resources that families can access online even without a smartphone. This website can eventually expand to include recipes and blog posts to act as an educational resource for families.
Shopping
Customers can look up item details and calculate the total price before checking out during their shopping process via the messaging system, designed for users with limited technology access.
Each child in the family receive $150 credit per week for the free grocery program.
There will be a product code and a QR code next to each item in the store.
Item Lookup:
Option 1: Users are able to check detailed information of a product including its eligibility for the FLOWER+ program without stigma.
Option 2: Customers can find a print-out version of eligible products for FLOWER+ at the store, and the items will be regularly updated.
Checkout
Instead of having to take out the EBT card at cashier to pay as customers in programs such as SNAP, in this newly designed checkout process, customers only need to tell the cashier their membership number, and the computer system will automatically calculate the actual amount they need to pay by checking their membership status and deducting the parts included in FLOWER+.
This simple checkout process can reduce friction and stigma from customers’ end.
Evaluation
Since Mini+Market requires collaborating with local grocery stores and businesses to be executable, we conducted pitch reviews with our community partner, Greenstar Food Co+op and an already operating free grocery store located in Nashville, Tenessee, The Store. We also conducted user testing with 4 individuals ages 18-22 to determine potential pain points in our item lookup design.
Protocol Disclaimer: All pitch reviews and usability tests were conducted through the video conferencing tool Zoom due to the constraints set by COVID-19.
Pitch Review Protocol
Project pitches started with a review of the issue we're trying to solve, an overview of our solution as a whole, and value adds for each stakeholder. We then left room for questions from our reviewers and then ended with questions we had of our own towards each reviewer. For GreenStar, we focused on gauging initial interest as a potential partner, whereas with The Store, we focused on implementation questions and concerns.
Pitch Review Findings
GreenStar Food Co-op
The Store
Usability Test Protocol
Users were asked to accomplish two tasks using the Figma mobile prototype while thinking their process out loud.
Figure out whether Horizon milk was eligible for FLO WER + .
Learn what kinds of eggs are eligible for FLOWER+.
Usability Test Findings
Simple and easy to use, very self-explanatory
Great to cater various user groups by using multiple modes
Complicated to enter the name or code of each products again in order to calculate the total price; have to go back to all the products
Can be a struggle to shop and text at the same time, but guess not a big deal
Results Synthesis
