Swiftgourmet

A meal delivery service created with sustainability in mind.

Design Brief

"Design a signup experience for a new food startup that will deliver the user a fully prepared gourmet meal once a week. It should help determine the users personal tastes, level of experimentation/pickiness, allergies and any other details to make the whole eating experience as good as it can be.”

Due to the flexibility of this assignment, I decided to create my own company and design the project for them.

Objective

How can I design a sustainable food subscription/delivery service that differs from those existing already?

My goal for this project was to create a sustainable meal delivery service that allows for the user to receive meals in weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or one time increments.

Background

I wanted to create a company that didn’t yet exist in Edmonton. I evaluated the different meal delivery/subscription services already available in order to come up with a concept that would differ from what’s already out there.

For research purposes, I looked into the background of two existing meal services: HelloFresh & Chef's Plate, which are a meal kit subscription services, and Skip the Dishes & UberEats, which are third-party meal delivery services.

Research

HelloFresh & Chef's plate deliver pre-portioned ingredients that the customer can use to prepare a predetermined recipe at home. Although this subscription does save the user some time in deciding what to cook for a meal, they still need to cook the meal themselves. This requires time and energy that the user may not always have. Meal kits still produce large amounts of waste, despite some of the containers that the food comes in being recyclable/compostable.

Skip the Dishes & UberEats are third party apps that allow the user to view hundreds of restaurants available in their local area and choose ready-to-eat meals to be delivered to their current location. This service is quick and convenient, however the food is usually delivered in single use containers, therefore creating a lot of waste.

The Birth of Swiftgourmet

When creating Swiftgourmet, I had the idea of combining the concepts of a meal kit and food delivery service. This produced ready to eat gourmet meals that can be scheduled to be delivered at a certain date and time chosen by the user. In order to add an element of excitement to the experience, the meals delivered would be a surprise. During the sign-up process, the user can select their preferences and dietary restrictions, therefore ensuring that whatever meal they receive would be to their taste.

In addition to that, I wanted the service to be as sustainable as possible, therefore the meals would only be delivered in high quality reusable containers — the user would have to pay a refundable deposit for the containers, therefore ensuring that minimal amounts of packaging waste are created and the dishes can be reused by Swiftgourmet.