FoodToGo

To eat or not to eat? That should not be a question.

Project Description

Problem

Each year, one-third of all food produced worldwide is thrown away, thus it is clear that we can all make a difference in the way we shop and eat.

Solution

With the help of technology, sustainable eating can be more straightforward than it has ever been before. Instead of throwing surplus food, restaurants can sell it through FoodToGO. Consumers buy food from the app as a takeaway and get high quality food for a reduced price. The app allows you to browse unsold food from restaurants, cafes and supermarkets.

Customer Segments

Our solution is aimed at every social category. It creates a bridge between restaurants and normal people and it is benefic for both parties.

Competition

This is a First on the Market solution in Romania as there is currently no software available which focuses on waste reduction on the current market.

Metrics

The functionality is often checked against the users feedback and improvements are made to meet their requirements. Also, before every release there are various sanity checks being run.

Customer Discovery

How did we identify the problem?

World hunger and food waste are two of the biggest and most paradoxical problems of our world. There is probably no immediate solution to any of them, but any step that goes towards solving at least a small part of them is valuable. Even if the biggest problem regarding hunger and food diversity happens in Africa, it can be seen at different levels in every society. Romania is not an exception. Eating at a restaurant is a luxury service for a big part of the people living in Romania and we would like to make it at least affordable from time to time for as many people as possible. Apart from that, most of the students rely on the food packages that they receive from home and on the food they find in the universities’ cafeterias. While those are very valuable things to have, we think that they may want to try a different meal than what they usually have from a higher rated place such as a restaurant.

A lot of restaurants cook food in big quantities both because it is more tasteful and also because it wastes less resources (electricity), but time of the cooks especially as it is usually unfeasible to cook the same dish 9 times in the same day in small portions for each customer that asks for that specific meal. As a result, this leads to food that is not actually sold because there were not enough customers that ordered it. As restaurants have to obey to QoS policies, most of the food they prepare one day is not going to be good to serve the next day as well. Not only that, but in order to gain a name in the overcrowded market of restaurants, freshness is usually one of the main things that customers look at when judging their food. The conclusion of the two previous points is that a lot of restaurants are faced with the decision of throwing very good meals or aliments just because they were not able to sell them.

What is the solution we thought of?

Our team hopes to come as a liaison between the two sides of the problem. Of course, for restaurants it would be more profitable to sell the actual food, even at a lower price rather than throwing it away. While there may be some people questioning the quality of the food at the end of the day, there will be also a lot of people we think that would embrace buying this food at a lower price as price is in general the biggest cause why people don’t order from a restaurant. Most of the people in Romania, and in the world in general don’t cook at home food that they eat only one day, so we believe that they won’t have a problem with the food being prepared at a previous point in the day rather than when they ask for it. As a result we thought of creating an application that offers restaurants the opportunity to list what products they have left at the end of the day and what price. Customers will check the menus and will decide if they want to order something that they would normally would not be able to. There will also be a form of rating the food that was received and the restaurant, so that we can hold the restaurants accountable for the food that they provide. One point of concern that needs to be addressed after analyzing the customers’ wishes is the way the food is going to be delivered to the customers.

What is the customer discovery plan?

We had some discussions in order to determine what customer segments we believe will be the most interested in this type of application that we provide. Then, we talked about what is the easiest way to reach them and also if we can make some conclusions that would apply for all the segments identified previously based on some that are easier to get to. After getting the data from a significant number of people, we will make an analysis to better determine if the conclusions match our expectations. As social media is so big these days and accessible to most of the people in Romania, we thought this is the best and easiest way to start our investigations. During our investigations we not only want to test that the application may be useful, but also that the premises that we started from are correct. Last, but not least we would like to gain some more in depth data through our questions about the segments that we test the idea on so that we can observe some red herring or preconceptions that we made.

Customer discovery process and results.

In order to determine the customer segments we tried to identify the main cause why people don’t eat at restaurants. It was quite obvious to us that the main reason should be that the prices are relatively high. Even if people who earn a lot of money do not eat every day at the restaurant the lower the salary, the more rare people go to restaurants. We thought that the application may have customers from all the societal classes (because even rich people enjoy bargains), but the main segments would be the ones with lower salaries or people who do not have a stable income. We determined that students from various universities may be a good indicator to test on, as most of them don’t work and they also come from different classes. As a result, we believe that they may give a good evidence of what people with the same traits to which it was harder for us to have access to. We also tried to get access to people from corporate environments that would normally afford to eat a normal meal at a restaurant. This would give us a good idea if this segment of people would also like the idea behind our application.

In order to reach the people that have been mentioned above, we created an online form that we sent to our friends from other universities. We required their help in order to pass it forward so that we have access to a wider range of students. Those of us who are currently working sent the form to their colleagues at work. As a result, we managed to reach a respectable number of over 100 responses from the two environments.

The results were quite rejoicing for us. 77.9% of our respondents eat food from a restaurant less than twice a week and in a proportion of 58.9% they don’t eat more because they consider the food to be too expensive. This came as a confirmation for the presumption that we have made before. We also asked them how variant is the food they eat on a weekly basis and most of them responded that they eat moderately variate food. This makes us think that they would enjoy eating from a restaurant because they tend to offer food that you may not normally cook.

The biggest positive was that 64.2% of the respondents said that they would enjoy eating food that would otherwise be thrown away by the restaurants at the end of the day. When breaking it down to the people that do not currently have a job, about 73% of them would like to benefit from our application. This also confirms our belief that people who have a lower income or do not have a stable income would enjoy this type of application. It came as a pleasant surprise, though that even over half of the people who would normally afford to eat at a restaurant (as people working in IT usually earn a pretty big salary in Romania compared to the average) would not mind eating this food instead of it being thrown away.

We also asked how much they would be willing to pay for two meals (one costing 30 lei and one costing 80 lei). For the cheaper meal 59.6% would pay over half the price whereas for the more expensive one 52.3% would pay over half. Also, around 90% of the people would be willing to pay around 40% of the price for the meal. This is very important as it is the starting point of talk with the restaurants as well. In order for this application to work, a common ground needs to be met in terms of the price asked for the meals as this was the main problem in the first place.

The last thing that the form revealed was that people are in general not willing to go and pick up the food but would rather have it delivered. This may be a potential drawback as we may have to focus in the first place on restaurants that have a delivery system in place, partner with a delivery company such as Glovo, Food Panda or Uber Eats or create a similar delivery system.

The product is not yet ready for customer validation. The next step that needs to be done is to go and talk with the persons that represent the other side of the application, the restaurant owners. We have a pretty clear view about what customers expect from our application and we can use this information when proposing it to the restaurants. Unfortunately, this is a bit harder as none of us has any connections in this world and we are still waiting for some e-mail responses so that we can set some brief face to face discussions. We would like to check that our premises are correct in terms of the food that gets wasted and the money that it could generate. Not only that, but we need to check their expectations in terms of price. We also need to make a financial plan that would show how much we would be able to earn from this types of deals between the customers and the restaurant. This needs to be negotiated with the owners as well. Only after these steps are finished we would be able to move on to create a landing page and start working on the MVP.

Application Wireframe

Visit the following website FoodToGo Wireframe to test our interactive application flow.

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Application Landing Page

Visit our Landing Page to tell us your opinion and win a promotional code.




Interviews


Interview 1

How important is for you the problem of planet resources overconsumption? What measures do you take?

It is definitely a problem regarding all of us and I believe that this is almost impossible to ignore it. I am happy that at least I get to recycle although it is not easy to do this in Bucharest. For me it is a great satisfaction to do this and I believe that any small impact matters. I reuse my water bottle and recycle oil. I try to eat less meat.

How much food do you think that remains unsold at restaurants and supermarkets?

I believe that there is a great percentage of food that remains unsold, more than half.

What do you think that happens with unsold food? What do you think it should be done with unsold food?

It is thrown away. I believe it should be donated.

Do you look for sales when you buy at a supermarket? If no and you see by mistake a similar product with a lower price, do you buy that one?

I use to look for sales most of the time. If there is something cheaper I buy that product.

Do you buy food that is close to its expiration date?

Yes, but I do not actively look for expiration day. Most of the times I do this by mistake

What is you style of eating? Do you cook? Do you order food? Do you go to restaurants? Is it different for lunch versus dinner?

I use to cook and when I do not have time I use to buy from bagel shops or sandwiches from supermarkets.

Do you trust that food you have at restaurants is fresh?

I hope that it is always fresh.

Do you take home the remaining food you have at restaurants?

I use to take if it remains a lot of food.

I you have remaining food that you cook, do you eat it in the next days?

Most of the times yes.

When you cook, do you cook for multiple days?

I use to cook only as much as I need for one day

How do you order food? Do you call restaurants or use any applications? How many applications do you use?

I order just at special events. It depends if the restaurant has an application or not. Most of the times I just call the restaurant.

Would you be interested to order food from restaurants that remain unsold at the end of the day? How much should the price be reduced in order to be happy about this? What about supermarkets?

I do not really afford to buy from restaurants because I am a student and I do not have a great income. I like to buy as cheap as I find. If it is cheaper of course I would. I would be happy with a 50% discount. For supermarkets it depends on the product and if I could eat that product on the same day. I would buy a chocolate that expires the next day, but I would not buy butter. I would be happy with a discount as low as 30%

Interview 2

How important is for you the problem of planet resources overconsumption? What measures do you take?

On a scale of 1 to 10 I would say 5. It does not affect me directly, but I am aware of it. I do not usually use a car and I try to use public transportation as much as I can

How much food do you think that remains unsold at restaurants and supermarkets?

I would say that more than half of food is thrown away. In US food cooked at restaurants is thrown away because of legislation. But they use to cook just for people that order. I know that at supermarkets there are discounts for food that is close to its expiration date

What do you think it should be done with unsold food?

I know that are countries where the food is donated. Otherwise it might be a good idea to be use as natural fertilizer.

Do you look for sales when you buy at a supermarket? If no and you see by mistake a similar product with a lower price, do you buy that one?

I look for sales just rarely. I might buy that cheaper product

Do you buy food that is close to its expiration date?

I buy it only if I know that I will eat it fast.

What is you style of eating? Do you cook? Do you order food? Do you go to restaurants? Is it different for lunch versus dinner?

I use to cook for dinner and eat at restaurants at work.

Do you take home the remaining food you have at restaurants?

No

I you have remaining food that you cook, do you eat it in the next days?

No

When you cook, do you cook for multiple days?

I use to cook only for current meal.

How do you order food? Do you call restaurants or use any applications? How many applications do you use?

I use 2 or 3 applications, and if a specific restaurant does not have an app I just call.

Would you be interested to order food from restaurants that remain unsold at the end of the day? How much should the price be reduced in order to be happy about this? What about supermarkets?

Yes, I would buy unsold food from restaurants. I would be happy with a 50% discount. For supermarkets it depends on the product. If I buy vegetables I would like to see that they are not rotten.

Interview 3

How important is for you the problem of planet resources overconsumption? What measures do you take?

On a scale of 1 to 10 I would say 8, very important. It think it does affect me directly. I recycle an reuse. I have the same shopping bag for 3 months. I do no throw garbage on the road. I try to use as much as I can biodegradable products.

How much food do you think that remains unsold at restaurants and supermarkets?

I would say 30% to 40%

What do you think that happens with unsold food? What do you think it should be done with unsold food?

It is thrown away. I know that at supermarkets there are discounts in the last 2 or 3 days. I know that in France restaurants are obligated to donate unsold food. I think the food should be donated.

Do you look for sales when you buy at a supermarket? If no and you see by mistake a similar product with a lower price, do you buy that one?

I do not really look for discounts. I would not buy for sure the cheaper product.

Do you buy food that is close to its expiration date?

Very rare.

What is you style of eating? Do you cook? Do you order food? Do you go to restaurants? Is it different for lunch versus dinner?

I use to cook for 50% of the time. I go to restaurants 30% and the rest of the time I just order.

When you cook, do you cook for multiple days?

I cook for a maximum of 3 days.

How do you order food? Do you call restaurants or use any applications? How many applications do you use?

I use 4+ applications.

Are you interested in food prices? Do you search for sales (food or transport) in other applications before you order?

Sometimes I do that

Would you be interested to order food from restaurants that remain unsold at the end of the day? How much should the price be reduced in order to be happy about this? What about supermarkets?

I do not like that concept. I like to cook because I know that what I cook is fresh. For supermarkets I think it is a very good idea. A 30% discount would make sense.

Interview 4

How important is for you the problem of planet resources overconsumption? What measures do you take?

It is somewhat important. I use to shutdown my work computer when I leave. I think everybody should take care of our planet in some ways. I use to recycle and I hope that I would extend a little the habitat of polar bears.

How much food do you think that remains unsold at restaurants and supermarkets?

I would say 20% for restaurants and grater than 50% for supermarkets

What do you think that happens with unsold food? What do you think it should be done with unsold food?

It is thrown away. My grandmother has a neighbour that works at a bagel shop and he use to bring her unsold products. I think people should eat that unsold food.

Do you look for the expiration date of your products?

Everytime.

Do you buy food that is close to its expiration date?

I do that many times.

What is you style of eating? Do you cook? Do you order food? Do you go to restaurants? Is it different for lunch versus dinner?

I use to order most of the time, I go the restaurants otherwise.

Do you take home the remaining food you have at restaurants? Do you eat the next days the food you order?

No. No

How do you order food? Do you call restaurants or use any applications? How many applications do you use?

I use only applications.

Would you be interested to order food from restaurants that remain unsold at the end of the day? How much should the price be reduced in order to be happy about this? What about supermarkets?

I would not do that for restaurants. It depends on the product from supermarkets. I would not buy vegetables. I would be happy with as little as 20%

User Persona

Bio

Andrei

24 years old

Lives in Bucharest with a colleague from college

Employed, Earnings 1500 eur/month

Needs

He would like cheaper products for cooking

He would like to get cheaper food from his favourite restaurant

He likes to cook, but wants his food to be fresh and always cook just for one meal

Problems

He is a busy person

He does not have always time for cooking or to go to restaurants

He believes it is expensive to order food from restaurants



User stories

As a student I want to buy cheap and quality food

As someone who works 8 hours a day I would like to manage my groceries on my way home

As someone who cares about the planet I would like to eat meals from my favourite restaurant that would be otherwise just a waste

As a non-corporate worker and arrive home tired I would like to enjoy a great dinner when I do not have time to cook

As a low income person I would like to spend less on food


User Flow

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Wireframe update

Interviews revealed that users would also be interested in buying from supermarkets. This feature is not yet available, but it might be integrated in the future. An update of the wireframe would consist in creating two separate views for restaurants and supermarkets. This would mean creating a page similar with the page listing the restaurants, but for supermarkets. The rest of the actions would remain the same.

Lead Generation Campaign

Subscription form

To start our lead generation campaign we have added the below shown contact information form to our landing page to provide potential clients with the ability to subscribe to our platform.



Results of subscription form

Throughout our campaign we have obtained various subscriptions from users, which can be observed in the image below (personal information has been censored out).



Sharing the landing page

We have shared our landing page using various platforms such as: Facebook, Whatsapp etc.



Permalinks of posts

https://www.facebook.com/groups/admiterease2019/permalink/1196029384118229/?app=fbl

https://www.facebook.com/groups/960922467632863/permalink/1068898253501950/?app=fbl

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1610395932581784/permalink/2477356855885683/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/462466777864328/permalink/545687329542272/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2420759301529842/permalink/2468645943407844/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/272952510010391/permalink/467475557224751/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2844133938950815/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/eap.2014.2015/permalink/2511369755609333/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/536719793157874/permalink/1436500766513101/

https://m.facebook.com/groups/558424267564072?view=permalink&id=3205777122828760

Results of campain

To track the number of visitors which our campain brought to the landing page, we have used the Google Analytics plugin made available by WordPress. The tracking was done throughout a week and the results are as follows:

- The most number of views are from Romania



- The most popular day and hour was Sunday at 9:00 AM



- The vast majority of traffic came from Facebook which clearly states it was the best leading channel in our campaign



- As we do not have many clickable items on our landing page we were unable to create a click map



Market Research

Size of the target market

By taking into account the results from our customer discovery process, during which we focused our search and spreading of our online form to two main categories, students and corporate workers with age in the range 23-35 (due to the fact that they will be more likely to use our application based on socioeconomic status and usage of technology), we can generalize and assume that our target market will consist of approximately 64.2% of those categories.

Our initials plans are centered around launching the product in Bucharest, for which the statistics are as follows: around 140.000 students each year and around 160.000 young corporate workers. Thus we estimate the total market size to be around 192.600, with the size of the sub-markets equal respectively to 89.880 for students and 102.720 for corporate workers.

Currently, we haven’t reached out in a systematic fashion to restaurants in Bucharest and we cannot determine the precise market size for them at this moment.

Competitors

At this moment the most popular applications for online food delivery are FoodPanda, Glovo, Uber Eats and Takeaway, all of which currently do not offer the service of delivering food prepared at a previous time in the day, which our product proposes. Although they do not offer this option, considering those companies already have well-defined networks of delivery, a solution can also be implemented in a relatively short amount of time, which could be to our disadvantage.

We have also discovered a startup with a similar goal to ours, named Tummy, which aims to also reduce food waste by creating the possibility of ordering food prepared previously on the same day. The company is still in its early stages, being founded one year ago, but nonetheless, it has this advantage compared to our product. In conclusion, there are currently 5 important competitors in our target market.

FoodPanda, Glovo, Uber Eats and Takeaway all share similar features regarding their applications and delivery process, giving the opportunity to select the restaurant and food from a list created based on criteria such as location, price and others. The food is then delivered by the restaurant or by the internal delivery partners of the company, allowing both online and cash payment. We expect that after our product will gain a large pool of users, those companies will also enter the competition by implementing similar functionalities in their apps. Regarding the Tummy startup, we discovered that it does not support delivery at home, customers being required to pick up the food by themselves. We consider this an advantage which will allow our product to gain market share after launch by also offering home delivery for the food.

Estimated market share and market value

In order to approximate the total market value, we considered that the value of the commission for FoodPanda and Uber Eats is around 20-30% per order, thus we considered an average commission of 25% per order. Assuming that each person in the target market will order food through our app 2 times a week (104 times a year) and with an average value of 40 lei (considering the responses in our customer discovery part), we obtain a total market value of 200.304.000 lei or 41.905.000 euro per year.

We plan that during the first year after launch we will get a market share of around 60%, our main competitor being Tummy, which we plan to overcome using features and partner restaurants that are not available in their platform. Considering that starting from year 2 we expect FoodPanda, Glovo, Uber Eats and Takeaway to also introduce our functionality due to increasing demand, we estimate that the market share will become around 50% for FoodToGo and the rest of 50% being shared equally between the competitors. We plan to remain at the 50% share during years 2, 3, 4 and 5 by making use of our advantage of being one of the first platforms to provide this service.

By taking into account the growing number of students and corporate workers and also the possibility of expansion in other cities in Romania (for example Cluj, Iasi or Timisoara), we estimate that the total market value will increase with at least 10.000.000 euro each year. Considering the previous arguments, the estimated predictions for total market share, FoodToGo’s market share and value of market share are as follows:

Year     Total Market Value      Market Share         Value of Market Share
  1	      41.905.000 euro		60%		 25.143.000 euro
  2	      51.905.000 euro		50%		 25.952.000 euro
  3	      61.905.000 euro		50%		 30.952.000 euro
  4	      71.905.000 euro		50%		 35.952.000 euro
  5	      81.905.000 euro		50%		 40.952.000 euro

First Sale

Access the MVP here

Clients

Even though there are changes to be made to the user interface, we decided to share the MVP with the first subscribers that registered at milestone 5. We contacted them asked in a email to complete a questionnaire about how they feel about the application and how likely they are to order food from it.


Most of them answered that the application seems to be is easy to use and to understand. They said that it would be likely to use this application

Results can be found here

Restaurants

Another confirmation is regarding whether restaurants would use this application.

We looked at our competitors and saw that they keep getting more restaurants involved and usually restaurants would be enrolled in partnerships with different food ordering apps in the same time.

Name         Number of restaurants
Food Panda   400
Glovo        100
Takeaway     500
Uber Eats    700

A survey ordered by Uber Eats showed that restaurants are more than happy to prepare food for a food ordering app.

Datele arată că atunci când vine vorba de top trei beneficii ale colaborării cu Uber Eats, 82% dintre respondenți au afirmat că acest parteneriat îi ajută să își crească numărul de comenzi, să livreze mai rapid comenzile (70%) și să aibă mai multă vizibilitate pentru afacerea lor (68%).

De asemenea, 72% dintre restaurantele care au răspuns sondajului spun că Uber Eats le-a ajutat să își crească afacerea. Aproape jumătate (47%) dintre respondenți spun că au înregistrat o creștere cuprinsă între 10% și 30%. Când vine vorba de cele mai multe comenzi primite într-o zi, 53% dintre restaurante au primit între 20 și 50 comenzi prin aplicația Uber Eats, în timp ce 8% au avut între 50 și 100 comenzi. 31% dintre restaurante au spus că se gândesc să angajeze mai mult personal pentru a acoperi numărul de comenzi în creștere, în timp ce 35% dintre ei se gândesc să își extindă afacerile. 9 din 10 manageri sau proprietari de restaurante au spus că ar recomanda Uber Eats și altor restaurante.

Many restaurants can be found in multiple food ordering applications. While we did not got in involved in partnerships with restaurants, we believe that restaurant owners would be happy to integrate this application that would boost their sales..

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Ungureanu Diana

Back-End

diana.ungureanu2706@gmail.com
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Icatoiu Cosmin

Project Owner

cosmin.icatoiu@gmail.com
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Geanaliu Gabriela

Front-End

geanaliugabriela@gmail.com
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Titiliuc Cosmin

Project Manager

cosmin.titiliuc@gmail.com
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Fetoiu Catalin

Fund Raising

fetoiucatalinemil@gmail.com