Freto - Food Tracking Made Simple I Aryan Rustagi

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Freto (1st Place)

2024

Case Study

As part of the SUEDE Designathon in September 2024, I collaborated with four teammates on the global challenge of food waste. Our goal was to design a solution that simplifies sustainable shopping and food tracking for busy individuals, aligning with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Through extensive user research, iterative design processes, and usability testing, we developed FreTo - an app that minimizes food waste by integrating QR code scanning for effortless inventory management, AI-driven meal suggestions, and personalized sustainability insights.

My team ended up in 1st Place towards the end of the competition.

Case Study

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Case Study

My team ended up in 1st Place towards the end of the competition.

Case Study

Scroll Down

Case Study

My team ended up in 1st Place towards the end of the competition.

Case Study

Scroll Down

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Problem

Food waste is a significant global issue, playing a major role in environmental degradation and inefficient use of resources. Across households, restaurants, and food production facilities, large quantities of food are left unused, resulting in avoidable waste.

Although sustainability has gained widespread attention, both individuals and businesses face significant challenges in adopting sustainable food practices. The difficulty lies in seamlessly integrating waste reduction strategies into daily routines, making it a complex problem to address.

This issue is directly aligned with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, which aims to halve global food waste by 2030 and promote sustainable practices across industries.

Solution

In 24 hours, we followed the double-diamond framework to research, build, and validate Freto.

A user-friendly app designed to reduce food waste through smart inventory management and personalised meal planning. By integrating QR code scanning for easy grocery tracking, AI-powered meal suggestions based on expiring ingredients, and visual insights on environmental impact, FreTo simplifies sustainable living for busy individuals.

As part of the brief, the research and design focused on users and sustainability, making the impact page the key feature users flocked to during testing. My team Freto placed 1st out of 22 other teams pitching amazing solutions in the sustainability space. We were judged by the senior designers from Frog and Maccquire Group.

Process

Role

Product, UX/UI, Research, UsabilityTesting, Measuring Metrics

Timeline

24 Hours (Overnight)

Before we started working on the problem, we had to decide on the situation we would tackle. We spent the first 1 hour going through the design brief, where we were given suggestions to choose from four different problems to tackle:

URBAN GARDENING AND FOOD SUSTAINABILITY

WASTE REDUCTION AND RECYCLING

ENERGY CONSERVATION

SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORTATION

As part of the brief, we had to align our research and solution with any of the 17 SDG goals mentioned by the UN. The team collectively assigned everyone to conduct eye-level secondary research where we only gather the most essential data mentioned on the internet and academic sources.

Key considerations we prioritised during the

entire discovery phase and testing:

Making it more accessible

Reduce costs for businesses/ consumers

Reduce resources/waste

Reduce complexity

Highly feasible

Innovation

One key problem we faced after this phase was to pick one topic that aligns with our priorities and the overarching goal of a winning user-focused product. Since all four problems have probable cause of execution and commitment, I decided to use the Effort vs Impact Matrix to decide on what should be built in 24 Hours.

I learned this framework while working at startups where there is no shortage of ideas and problems to solve, but at the same time, there is a lack of resources to allocate. We compared all four topics and looked into their market size and impact potential:

Considering that we only had a short amount of time and access to limited resources, we focused our entire project on high-impact and low-effort-focused problems, where Food Waste Reduction came out on top. Energy consumption was the tie-breaker and 2 people in the team did want to proceed with that topic.

However, after analysing the data that we gathered through secondary research, it unanimously decided we pursue food waste as its potential impact if solved would be much deeper compared to energy consumption.

Background Research

12:00

Time

Key Findings:

7.6M

tonnes of food is wasted each year in

Australia

tonnes of food is wasted each year in

Australia

17.5M

tonnes of Co2 emitted.

$19.3bn

cost to households

On average each person wastes 120KG of food each year*

Research Objectives

13:00

Time

Once the Problem Scenario was finalised, we wanted to gather deeper insights into the problem and understand our stakeholders further. Therefore, four key research objectives were developed to navigate our research and understand why and how people behave with food waste:

Understand User Behaviours and Attitudes Toward Food waste

Explore the Key Barriers to Adopting Food Waste Reduction Practices

Analyse the Effectiveness of Current Food Waste Management Solutions

Identify Incentives That Encourage Sustainable Food Practices

Primary Research

13:20

Time

Research Objectives settled, we conducted the triangulation method of surveys, semi-structured interviews and online ethnography surrounding the topic.

Survey Responses

User Interviews

Online Ethnography

Analysis

15:30

Time

Following our qualitative and quantitative research, we wanted to identify key themes and user pain points. Using affinity diagramming, we synthesised insights, grouping them into clusters that revealed key themes related to food waste behaviours, tracking difficulties, and decision-making patterns:

We identified critical user needs, which helped refine our user persona, journey map, and design problem statement:

Synthesis

16:05

Time

Building on our analysis, we synthesised our research findings into actionable insights by developing HMWs, user personas, journey maps, and key behavioural patterns. This step helped us translate raw data to clearly understanding user needs, motivations, and pain points

How Might We:

User Persona and Journey:

We created a primary user persona, Sarah, a busy university student who balances work and studies. She struggles with food waste due to forgetfulness, a lack of tracking tools, and time constraints. Her journey map highlighted her frustration at discovering spoiled food and her strong motivation to save money rather than focus solely on sustainability.

Key Insights:

We identified that users need a seamless solution that integrates with their daily routines:

Final Problem Statement:

This phase helped define our design problem statement, ensuring that our final concept would address the core issues users face:

Many individuals fail to incorporate sustainable food practices due to complexity, time constraints, and a lack of accessible tools for shopping and waste tracking. They are motivated more by saving money than environmental concerns, emphasising a lack of awareness on the broader impacts.

How might we create a digital solution that simplifies sustainable shopping and food tracking to reduce food waste and provide education for busy individuals?

With all the synthesised data in our hands, we proceeded with ideation and early testing to scope out possible solutions/opportunities of improvements.

Ideation

19:15

Time

With a deep understanding of our target users and a full belly, we proceeded with ideation and started writing down our crazy ideas suing the Crazy 8's framework. Why crazy 8's? Well the goal is to be fast in getting your ideas out without worrying much about the details, so that we can build quick and test as soon as possible.

We had some crazy ideas, so too select the top three ideas, we conducting voting were the top 3 were discussed and potentially integrated within each other. With less than 12 hours left before submission, we had to get going.

Competitor Analysis

We wanted to figure out how other food-focused apps solve this issue and what their users say. This gave us an insight into how some of the problems are solved currently.

Sketching

21:00

Time

With some time spent deciding key solutions and features to implement, we started sketching wireframes with the goal of quick prototyping and a high focus on testing/user feedback.

Above is just a small glimpse into the number of sketches we drew, these were the designs we decided to proceed with, and we spent some time talking with each other and sharing our concepts.

Our sketches provided clarity for future iterations, enabling us to evaluate our product from both a design and visual perspective.

In these sketches, we tried emphasising the inventory and scan feature - a quick uploading and managing your pantry. Our iterations commonly featured the home screen and navigation that presented users with information about their pantry and habits in a simple way.

MId-Fidelity

22:05

Time

Mid-fidelity prototypes were then created to test the concept. 3 Think Alouds were conducted (at 2 am) to validate our design and solution.

In total, we conducted:

3 Think aloud
2 Structured Interviews
3 SUS surveys
1 Unstructured Interview.

Iterations

02:00

Time

Upon receiving data from our user testing, the following changes were made to the design:

Home Page:

The key feedback we received from participants for this page was the information overload and the common factor that there was no information hierarchy to guide users when navigating and performing key tasks such as finding all meal plans.

Within two testing round and therefore 2 iteration cycles, we had clearly presented users with main application of the app and the quick navigation with proper visual and information hierarchy.

For the task of tracking meal plans the SUS score improved from 39.0 -> 83.5.

Note: THe text in the top was added to present facts about food. The motivation was to bring a sense of comfort/ease when user first open the app.

Inventory

Participants were very confused about the headings, the adjustments reduces ambiguity and aligns with user expectations. In the 2nd iteration, the red delete button for removing items was introduced in the main inventory page, improving efficiency in inventory management and making it clearer how users can modify their list.

Overall iterations were made to enhance clarity, improve usability, reduce cognitive load, maintain consistency.

Impact

This page and feature were my core focus (my baby). As a person interested in sustainability, personal impact was crucial to be visualised/presented so that users can track their progress and have consistency.

User feedback suggested that carbon emissions alone were not meaningful enough. To enhance relevance, the design now includes monthly cost savings as the main highlight alongside water and carbon footprint reduction, making the impact more tangible.

The plant growth indicators were replaced with the traditional progress bar we had before, improving clarity and making it easier to interpret progress.

With all major iterations made and an onboarding flow in construction, the final major designs changes were made in high fidelity prototypes.

High-Fidelity

06:00

Time

After almost 3 hours of constant improvements, we made final changes, build a design system, and full fledged mockups.

Following the final designs, we conducted one last test to make sure we get some more user feedback, and have something to work on post designathon.

Here is the prototype and some key features.

SIMPLIFICATION

Reduces food waste and saves money by offering timely meal ideas based on ingredients nearing expiration, simplifying meal planning and grocery management.

EDUCATION AND AWARENESS

Helps users easily understand, simplify and improve their consumption habits. Empower users to see the direct impact of their choices on both their budget and the environment, motivating positive change.

Reflection

Our team ended up getting into finals after a quick semi-finals round. Overall, we ended up scoring the highest and won the designathon.

As part of the FreTo Designathon team, I contributed across multiple project phases, focusing on research, user interviews, sketching, and developing the impact feature.

During the research phase, I helped gather insights through qualitative and quantitative methods and conducted user interviews, ensuring we captured real-world challenges and motivations that informed our design decisions.

In the ideation and prototyping stages, I participated in sketching and wireframing, focusing on quick iterations and prototyping while quickly iterating the user flow as well. Additionally, I played a key role in shaping the impact feature, which visualises user savings in terms of money, which is the core, and then also visualising water, and carbon emissions, making sustainability efforts more tangible and motivating for users.

I would like to give props to my team members who without, this would not have been possible. We were the only team that was on campus for the entire duration of the competition, whereas the other teams went home. Their dedication to building a good product ultimately led us to victory.

What I would change:

Iterative Testing with a Broader User Base

Even though our user testing was valuable, I would love to expand it to a more diverse audience, including users from different age groups and household sizes, to ensure the solution works for a variety of lifestyles.

Due to the time and location were only restricted to young adults/students. The key thing I need to remember for future projects is diverse audiences and backgrounds help us figure out problems and opportunities that we would have never paid attention too.

Focusing on Typography and Information Hierarchy

Some iterations revealed user confusion regarding terminology and screen flows (e.g., “Patterns” vs. “Insights”). I would improve my skill in information hierarchy by learning copywriting, and frameworks, and just testing with users, friends, and tools on the internet.

If we had more time, I would have conducted testing on different variations focusing on typography, alignment, and imagery. Maybe we could reduce information overload early n the process.

Appendix

Empathy Map

User Modelling

Thank you