WIC–helping restaurants better manage their inventory and donating leftovers to food charities

Project Statement

In today’s time, people are blessed with an abundance of food around us. In every corner of the world you can find rich culture of street food and restaurants with every kind of food you can imagine. With this huge availability of food we can easily forget the poor or less fortunate people that walk amongst us. Everyday these people struggle for even one proper meal and this is a true problem that is easily overlooked in this modern world. In this project, I attempted to dive deep into the various causes and different solutions that might help improve this situation by using design thinking methodology by Stanford D School.

In the first stage of design thinking, I planned to investigate this problem by reading articles and researching online to help me better understand the current situation and help point me in the right direction for further research. I started by interviewing different food vendors, restaurant managers, restaurant owners, and also restaurant staff. By doing this, I hope to understand the system in place and to figure out what happens to all the leftover food at the end of the day. I knew from preliminary research that most restaurants around the world tend to over-stock and are unable to use up all the food before it gets spoiled. So by interviewing restaurants and food vendors, I was able to properly define the issue at hand. During this stage, I was able to define the key personas involved and I was able to understand their goals and different pain points of each persona involved.

At this point, I had a great understanding of the problem at hand and was now ready to explore different solutions that would help reduce food waste and also cater the needs of each personas involved. I decided to come up with multiple solutions that would work together to help restaurants reduce food waste and be more efficient in general. The first solution is the Inventory Management System which would allow the restaurant manager to keep track of each item in its inventory and with the help of our second solution which is a Cognitive Food Container the restaurant manager would easily be able to realize when the food is about to go bad. The third solution is to allow a proper means for restaurants to make use of food that is about to expire by either donating via using our Leftover Pickup Service or cooking up food from our suggested food recipes. The collection of these solutions was a perfect opportunity to invent a business and call it WIC.