Food on the Go!

For this project, our team came up with a solution to solve the issue of food-on-the-go. While there are various ways to tackle this, including the physical transportation of food or hand-held snacks, we decided to focus on improving information and physical access. Within our solution, we aimed to educate families about healthy food options through their children by making learning about different unfamiliar foods fun.

Goal: Increase information and physical access to healthy food options in the Austin area

Timeline

Team

My Contributions

Tags

March - May 2022

Stephanie C. Cyrill
Zach Harper
Caroline Jones

Contextual Interviewing
Ideation
Journey Map
Project Management
Storyboard Creation

Design Thinking
Interviewing

Overview

When looking at the city of Austin, it is clear that access to healthy food options is unevenly distributed. Those in higher income brackets have easy access to healthier foods, which leads to better health outcomes, whereas the opposite happens to those who make lower incomes. Lower-income households generally inhabit food deserts: areas where securing affordable, healthy food is inconvenient. These food deserts create barriers to families and communities getting healthier, along with making them face tough decisions, such as choosing between healthy food options or junk food that is convenient, spending extra time cooking meals at home or popping a microwave pizza in the oven, etc. As many families face these challenges, we wanted to explore the interplay between health, access, and sustainability, and how food on the go could be used to create a more equitable Austin metro area.

Research & Focus Development

We conducted research through community interviews and desk research. We gained new insights on community health practices, food deserts, and best practices around sustainable food practices from different articles and literary journals. Having gathered this information, we began doing community interviews with farmers and food policy workers. These groups taught us about efforts to provide healthy food options to the Austin area, with some explicitly focusing on low-income communities. As we observed and talked to SMEs, all mentioned the impact that lack of information and physical food access has on families, highlighting the fact that if parents don’t know how to prepare certain foods, that bars their children from accessing them, which can impact their health long-term. With this in mind, we began focusing on educating families about healthy food options.

View full research report here

View focus statement here

After interviewing one of our SMEs that ran a farmer's market in Austin, we had the opportunity to explore her store and were fascinated by her approach to educating her customers on produce.

Next to each produce item in the market, the farmer provided information cards that detailed what the vegetable was, along with what could be done with the vegetable. By providing this, the farmer effectively lowered the barrier that customers might have towards buying nutritious, yet unfamiliar, produce by giving them all they needed to know about it. In addition to this, the farmer also provided vegetable pamphlets that customers could take home with them.

We thought this was a great idea, but as we observed and interviewed families visiting the farm, we found that while they did purchase food at the market, they rarely purchased unfamiliar produce and viewed the farmer's market as a family outing, where they would spend time with their children and buy items they knew the child would eat. With this in mind, we were faced with one question, how can we get parents to buy unfamiliar, healthy produce? Through their children.

Two major insights we gained were:

People are generally deterred by unfamiliar foods because they may not know how to prepare them
Getting kids excited about healthy foods is a great way to reach the parents

Because parents were more willing to expose themselves to unfamiliar foods if they are in spaces, like farmers' markets, we determined that children are prime influencers of food purchasing decisions for the family, and thus our product should be directed towards them. Thus, our product needed to:

Be exciting and fun for children
Spark curiosity about unfamiliar foods
Educate parents on how to implement these unfamiliar foods into their lives

The 'Va Verde!' Piñata

To increase physical and information access to change behaviors around healthy foods, we created the ¡Va Verde! Piñata, which was designed to hold healthy snacks—even fresh produce!—with recipes and ideas for preparing the food attached to the contents. The recipe cards will offer various meal ideas and potential uses for certain ingredients and produce corresponding to the food preferences of the geographic area where the piñata will be sold/distributed. The piñata will serve to introduce families to new vegetables they might not otherwise know what to do with in a way that is convenient, exciting, and risk-free.

Piñata Contents

We chose to fill the piñata with Smart Sweets, fruit strips, and dried fruits as these were healthy alternatives to candy and other junk foods that typically fill piñatas. We attached the recipe cards to healthy snacks so that the candy could serve as the medium for the unfamiliar food information, which included the vegetable introducing themself, a fun catchphrase, nutritional benefits, and a short list of ways that it could be cooked.

Piloting the Piñata

To pilot our piñata, we set it up at SFC Farmer's Market and advertised it to different families with children. Once the word was out, children came and hit the piñata until the contents came out. As anticipated, they ran to collect the snacks and brought them to their parents to hold as they collected more. After everything was collected, many children were curious about the recipe cards that were attached to the candy and asked their parents about it, which helped the parent get involved and learn more about produce as they were reading the cards to their children.

Presenting the Piñata