Origin Matters.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to extend our gratitude to Idiom and DREAM:IN India for their support on this project. Without their help, we would not have had access to many of the people and places within the Indian food context. We would also like to thank ThoughtWorks New York for their generosity in funding a trip to Bangalore, in order to push this project forward. A special thanks to Neha Bhatia, Aditi Bajpai, Ansh Patel, Deepti Sunder, Dimple Jangda, Neha Bhatia, Nithya Asokan and Sneha Srinivasan, for helping us ground our project in the Indian context while working in New York. Thanks to Breads Bakery and City Bakery for providing support to executing our prototypes in NYC. Finally, we would like to show our appreciation to our fellow Transdisciplinary Design classmates for their help and support in developing this project as well as our professor Carlos Texeira, for his guidance throughout the entire process.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT PROJECT OVERVIEW TRENDS
India’s Food System Is Changing Today The Rise of the Middle Class The Rise of Online Shopping The Rise Of Healthy Consumption SPECULATION Today’s Grocery Shopping Journey Grocery Shopping Journey Of Tomorrow STRATEGIES Product Features: Online Shopping Case Study 1 Product Features: Social Aspects Case Study 2 IMPACT
Theory of Change Roadmap For Implementation APPENDIX
PROJECT OVERVIEW THE CONTEXT
OUR INTERVENTION
With the fastest growing population in the world and a growing economy, India is a country with an ever changing economic landscape. A middle class that has doubled in size over the past two years is giving rise to different consumer values. With this newly disposable income, the Indian middle class has the means and the motivation to become more health conscious in their food purchasing habits.
Khanachale taps into this new opportunity in the Indian food system. Our solution provides shopping convenience, variety of choice, and reliable information about food origin. By empowering the consumer to make informed food choices, we allow for increased transparency in the food system. Ultimately, we look to motivate both consumers and producers to rethink the Indian food supply chain.
EXISTING VALUE WEB
VALUE WEB WITH OUR INTERVENTION
TRENDS
INDIA’S FOOD SYSTEM IS CHANGING TODAY The Indian economy relies on agriculture; it accounts for over 50% of the employment in rural areas and 13% of the national GDP. However, despite it ranking within the top five countries in the world for agricultural production, India still suffers from issues of food security and quality. Estimates of food loss each year range from 20-40% due to lack of infrastructure and storage. These challenges as well as an increasing demand from consumers for higher quality foods have pushed the Indian government to rethink food processing strategies. The introduction of Mega Food Parks looks to streamline the supply chain through the mass processing of food. These parks engage multiple stakeholders and allow manufacturers, marketers, distributors, and retailers to all contribute in taking food from farms to plates. Mega Food Parks are the response to a rapidly growing population and a greater emphasis on food quality and security that are radically transforming the food system in India.
The growth of Mega Food Parks and big grocery retailers are changing processing and purchasing habits in the Indian food system.
The growth of mass processing and packaged goods in India is accompanied by the introduction of large scale hypermarkets. Kishore Biyani, entrepreneur and CEO of Future Group, opened his first Food Bazaar in 2002. According to their website, the chain of supermarkets combines western values of convenience, cleanliness and hygiene through pre-packed commodities and the Indian values of ‘see-touch- feel’, through the bazaar-like atmosphere. From both the produc-
tion and retail sectors, it is clear that the Indian food landscape is radically shifting. If the model is transforming how is the consumer changing?
Picture is from the India Foodpark Brochure, Idiom Design Consultancy, Lead The Food Movement, pages 8-9
TRENDS
THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
A growing middle class is changing the buying habits of the modern Indian family. Throughout most of India’s history, the majority of the population has lived in extreme poverty. As recently as 1985, 90% of Indians lived with less that one dollar a day (Mckinsey & Company, 2007). However, India is on a journey of remarkable transformations. With the rapid economic growth in the last decade, millions of households have been lifted out of poverty and as of 2013, India ranked as the 10th largest economy in the world (World Bank, 2013).
A study by McKinsey & Company shows that 200 million people have entered the Indian middle-class over the last decade. The trend is that this number will reach almost 600 million people by 2025. The middle-class expansion has a direct economic effect on patterns of consumption, which has the potential to fuel domestic growth. This presents an opportunity for businesses addressing the Indian middle-class emerging consumer needs.
TRENDS
THE RISE OF ONLINE SHOPPING
The rising internet penetration and growth of online shopping can reshape the consumer patterns of this new middle class. In 2015, India will have the second largest online population in the world (behind China) with 330 million users (McKinsey & Company, 2013). That number is remarkably 3 times bigger than the internet user base of 2012 (120 million). However, online shopping contributed only 1.6% to the national GDP as of 2011, as compared to 3.4% in developed nations. This gap could be covered by 2015 (as pointed by a recent McKinsey & Company report), given that India addresses the challenges of internet “infrastructure”, cost and literacy. Less known, however, is how this growth is reshaping the style of Indian families and the potentially new consumer patterns. With the economic opportunity provided by the growth of the middle-class, businesses are
already tapping into the online shopping sphere. Successful cases include Flipkart, an e-commerce company that achieved a 5 million customer base and 7000 employees in 2014 (7 years after its launch), and Red Bus, today’s India’s biggest bus ticketing and hotel booking company, with over 10 million tickets sold online. In the food sector, India’s main chains of supermarkets (Big Bazaar, Big Basket, Reliance, Spencers, HyperCITY, D-mart, etc.) are already selling their products online. These numbers are only scratching the surface of what is to come. The rise of an online shopping trend combined with the growth of the middle class present a unique opportunity for new products and services.
Current successful cases of online shopping scratch the surface of the potential of e-commerce
TRENDS
THE RISE OF HEALTHY CONSUMPTION
With newly disposable income and growing awareness of health issues, today’s Indian middle class cares more about eating healthy products. The Indian diet varies across the country, but the average staple diet combined of lentils, rice, vegetables, paneer (a kind of white cheese) and meat provides a good range of nutrients. It is what grandparents would call “simple and good”. However, issues with food safety and an information gap keep consumers distant from knowing the origin of their food. Our project has conducted a pilot survey during our research phase with 60 middle-class participants from major cities in
India. The basic evidence collected shows a high interest in knowing the origin of the food (against a low understanding in how to go about finding it) and an increasing interest in eating “healthier”. When asked about “what eating healthy means”, the top given definitions were: fresh, well-balanced diet, whole grains and organic. A recent study also shows that the organic market is growing at 19% per year since 2012 (India Organic Food Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2019).
Pilot survey conducted in November, 2014
SPECULATION
TODAY’S GROCERY SHOPPING JOURNEY
Finding the origin of the food can be a challenge in today’s shopping experience
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Middle class women and men are working professionals with busy daily schedules. Shopping food is usually a time-consuming activity.
They are also financially independent and willing to make more informed choices about the food they purchase. However, shopping food can still be a confused experience for the ones who want to know the origin of what they buy.
After shopping, going back home can be frustrating if one’s caring many food bags and having to lay on auto-rickshaws. Mainly during the monsoon season!
What if
we could better connect the people of Indian urban centers to the rural origins of their food?
SPECULATION
GROCERY SHOPPING JOURNEY OF TOMORROW Khanachale combines the convenience of online shopping with the trust of food origin transparency
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THE CONSUMER COULD CHOOSE ALL HEALTHY PRODUCTS IN ONE PLACE
KNOW THE ORIGIN OF THEIR FOOD
AND GET IT DELIVERED AT THE COMFORT OF THEIR HOME
STRATEGIES
PRODUCT FEATURES: ONLINE SHOPPING Khanachale provides its users with knowledge of food origin and incentives to buy local products. Khanachale walks our users through a user-friendly and innovative online shopping experience. Customers can easily search for products by category or by origin. On the products page, consumers are pulled into a compelling story of the food and the region of India in which it is grown. Upon checkout, buyers can decide on a payment method and are rewarded with points for purchasing locally. Featured products and suggested recipes further amplify the buying experience. Valuing transparency, Khanachale provides customers with the necessary knowledge needed to make informed purchasing choices.
CONVENIENT SHOPPING EXPERIENCE Khanachale provides customers with a convenient shopping experience that looks to take the negative labor out of shopping for groceries.
Categories of food For simple navigation we display the categories of products that we offer. Customers can easily find the type of food that they want. Featured product Our featured product of the week is an item for which we are offering a special discount. Because we encourage buying local, this product may vary depending on the city in which you live. Shopping list/checkout Our shopping list allows users to continually see what they are buying. The checkout button allows them to proceed to payment for their purchase. Value proposition Our Value Proposition clearly displays the benefits of shopping with Khanachale. Our service allows customers shop from home, know the origin of their food, and gain points for buying food that is sourced locally.
Affiliated retailers In staying with our core value of transparency, we display a list of affiliated retailers that we partner with in each city. Payment methods We offer the option for our customers to pay with a credit card or pay on delivery. If people choose credit card we store the information in their account, if not our staff delivery person receives payment upon delivering the order.
CHECKOUT In addition to giving the basic information of quantity and price, our online checkout feature has two characteristics that are unique to Khanachale’s mission to empower consumers to make informed buying choices. The Food Kilometer Average allows people to see the average number of kilometers their total purchase is travelling. Checkout is also where customers see their Kilometer Points. If their average FKA is less than 100 kilometers then they receive points that, when accumulated, can be redeemed for discounts on food purchases on the website.
PRODUCT PAGE Product pages on other Indian online grocery shopping sites provide users with a description of what the product looks and taste like, as well as basic nutritional facts. Khanachale’s product pages give this essential information and more. We provide our users with an immersive buying experience; one in which the consumer feels as if they know not just the superficial story of the food, but the stories behind the food as well. We do this with a set of features that provide our customers with intimate knowledge of the origin of our food:
Story of the product Knowing the products means knowing their stories. Khanachale offers our users a comprehensive description of the products. By showing the essential aesthetic and nutritional information we how the benefits of each product. Likewise, we create a compelling story for each product by describing the farm and region from which the product comes. Picture of the farm/region For the more visually inclined, we provide a picture of the farm and region from which the product is grown.
Regional Information We provide customers with pertinent regional information such as current weather, and overall regional climate. This includes information about the current year’s rainfall to date and what that can mean for the desired product. Map We feel that seeing is believing. Our Food Map feature allows our customers to visually locate where in India their food is grown.
Kilometers to your city In order to make the Food Map as meaningful as it can be to users, it is accompanied with a calculation of the total kilometers the product travels to get to the designated city. Meet the farmer Who better to learn about the food from than the person who grew it? Each product’s story is complete with a biography of a farmer from the region in which it was grown.
STRATEGIES
CASE STUDY 1: PREETI Preeti is a working mother, currently living in Bangalore. One of her main concerns is to take care of her family by buying good quality food. She wants to find out more about the origin of the food and make informed choices about what to purchase. But when she comes to the local supermarket, she finds it confusing to navigate the number of products offered. She mentions the product packages offer limited information, usually providing at most the nutrition facts. When Preeti finds out about Khanachale, she decides to give it a try.
1. Website Home Page 2. Product Page 3. Check-out Options 4. Home Delivery
On the website home page, she can already see the weekly deals (including a special discount in her 1st purchase), she can browse through different categories of food products (vegetables, fruits, grains, etc.) and she learns that Khanachale is sourcing the healthiest food options from a great variety of supermarkets in Bangalore. She clicks on the dairy category and starts browsing through different brands that offer fresh, organic and whole milk. On the product page, Preeti can see a map that allows her to visually track where the product is coming from. She can also read detailed information about the farmer the brand, the nutrition facts and the region characteristics where the product was grown or made (weather & environmental conditions, use of fertilisers, etc.) . After going through her supermarket list, she is ready to check out. When buying local products, Preeti accumulates points (through our Food Kilometer Average program), that she can redeem discounts in future purchases. Once checking out, she can choose the option to pay-on-delivery or use a credit/ debit card. These options allow customers to feel more comfortable in shopping online by choosing when to pay. Within 1-2 days, Preeti gets her shopping items delivered at home, for no extra cost.
STRATEGIES
PRODUCT FEATURES: SOCIAL ASPECTS Khanachale gives users incentive to join through a series of social networking strategies. Our platform relies on customers becoming members. We make it very easy and beneficial to become a member of Khanachale. Like many online shopping websites, the act of purchasing and delivering an order creates a user account for a customer and stores his address, email, and pincode. We also offer incentives to use our service and to get other people to join. In addition to invitations and gift cards that can be sent to others, Khanachale offers a social networking aspect as another way to extend its reach. By allowing users to create, share, and rate recipes we make purchasing, making, and eating food a collective online experience.
SOCIAL MEDIA ASPECTS Khanachale utilizes aspects of social media as another way to grow the user base. The Customer Cookbook allows users to post recipes with the ingredients that they bought from us. While Khanachale provides its customers with the stories of the products before they are eaten, our customers provide us with the stories of the food once it is ready to eat. Recipe rating system Our customers will have the opportunity to interact with one another through the recipes they create. The Recipe Rater allows our users to rate and post comments or alterations to the original recipes. Our landing page will display the highest rated recipe as the featured recipe of the week. Related recipes Product detail page the shows users other recipes that can be made with the same or similar ingredients.
MEMBERSHIP Our platform relies on customers to become members. We make it very easy and beneficial to become a member of Khanachale. Like many online shopping websites, the act of purchasing and delivering an order creates a user account for a customer and stores his address, email, and pincode. We also offer incentives to join and to get other people to join.
Sent promo/invitation code/gift cards One way that we incentivize more people to buy with us is by allowing for invitations and gifts. Personal invitation codes allow for both the giver and the receiver to acquire more points in our system. Points can also be used as gifts. Both are ways to bring more people into the Khanachale system. New user discount We offer free points to first time users of Khanachale. This not only acts as an incentive to use our service, but by virtue of giving away free points it also makes customers comfortable with the logistics of buying groceries with us.
STRATEGIES
CASE STUDY 2: GUNCHA Guncha is a financially independent woman, living with her husband in Mumbai. She recently got married and is looking forward to have a balanced & healthy diet. For her regular food shopping, she is now using Khanachale and enjoys many benefits the membership offers. When Guncha used the website for the first time, she had an immediate new user discount in her first purchase. To become a member, she has created an account by entering basic details (contact information and pin code) and saved her preferred city and location for shopping. Guncha enjoys cooking and she now noticed Khanachale allows users to create, share and rate recipes on the website. She also finds it convenient that recipes are directly linked to products, so whenever she likes a recipe she can immediately order the products and get them delivered. 1. New User Discount 2. Membership Recipes Promotional Discounts Gift Cards
At work, she has mentioned to her colleagues about the convenience of shopping healthy food online, knowing its origin. She is now sending them promotional codes and invitations to the website. For that, she accumulates points that can be redeemed as discounts. Guncha’s office manager has enjoyed the experience so much that he decided to use Khanachale’s gift cards and handled some of them to the office team in the occasion of Diwali.
IMPACT
THEORY OF CHANGE The small intervention that Khanachale creates can have significant impacts on the Indian food system. We empower consumers with a shopping experience that allows them to track the origin of their food. In the short-term, (1) we increase: The number of people knowing the origin of their food; The number of consumers making more informed choices. In the long-term (2), our impact allows for: The increased demand for local & organic food; Increased transparency in the food production (with new product labeling and legal practices); A deeper change in people’s mindset about their food choices. Our vision is the improved health and well-being of all Indian families.
IMPACT
ROADMAP FOR IMPLEMENTATION Khanachale would have to be implemented in four distinct phases
APPENDIX
FUNCTION STRUCTURE
APPENDIX
FIELD TRIP IN INDIA
Working on a project from the other side of the world necessitates a need to obtain as much contextual information as possible. As part of the research for Khanachale, Reid Henkel traveled to Bangalore, India. Working with DREAM:IN India and Idiom Design and Consulting, Reid was able to immerse himself in the Indian context and gain valuable insights into the food system, everything from farms to supermarkets to open air markets.
APPENDIX
WORKSHOP SERIES As part of our process we ran a series of four workshops. These workshops helped us frame our question and begin to ideate a potential intervention. The participants included our fellow Transdisciplinary Design students as well as six students from India who helped us ground our project in the Indian context.
APPENDIX
PROTOTYPES We created a series of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) as a way to test the feasibility of our service. The MVPs forced us to think about our service on the granular level of features. We were able to run a couple of quick prototypes with local bakeries. These tests gave us valuable insights into how our service might actually work when implemented.
APPENDIX
THE TEAM
Sichun Song is a designer and envisioner from industrial design background. She brings imagination and craftsmanship to craft novel strategies, services and product tailored for different contexts and scales.
Reid Henkel has the unbridled imagination and enthusiasm of a small child. As a former preschool teacher and with an academic background in psychology, Reid brings an understanding of people with a keen eye on the bigger picture to every project.
Ricardo Dutra is from an engineering background, passionate about social innovation. He worked with social entrepreneurs in Brazil and India and brings to the team a sense of process thinking and strategy. He believes impact is scaled once business approaches are combined with social missions.
APPENDIX
REFERENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY Larry Keeley, “Ten types of Innovation”, 2013. Vijay Kumar, “101 Design Methods”, 2013. Alex Pentland, “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread”, 2014. Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup”, 2011. Kim Erwin, “Communicating The New”, 2014. Mckinsey & Company, “Next Big Spenders: Indian Middle Class”: http://www.mckinsey. com/Insights/MGI/In_the_news/Next_big_spenders_Indian_middle_class Times of India, “India’s Middle Class awakes”: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/edit-page/Indias-middle-class-awakes/articleshow/26221440.cms PR Newswire, “India Organic Food Market Forecast Opportunities 2017” http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/india-organic-food-market-forecast--opportunities-2017-212204521.html Reportlinker, “India Organic Food Market Forecast Opportunities” http://www.reportlinker.com/p01361158/India-Organic-Food-Market-Forecast-Opportunities.html