The Research

Literature

According to SDG, 22% of children under 5 worldwide are malnourished and according to WHO around 45% of deaths among children under 5 are linked to malnutrition. A big cause of this is due to food availability, affordability, and lack of information available about nutrition. The USDA research compares how does household income correlates to spending habits for at-home food. According to their statistics, higher-income households in the US and UK spent less than 10 percent of their total income for eating at home while lower-income households report as much as 50% of their income is spent on at-home food. While comparing the calories per capita, the US has the highest availability of calories of any other country, while they spent the least amount of percentage of their income. Since the lower-income households have food as a big part of their income, oftentimes their money is spent on unhealthy food with little to no nutritional value. This causes malnourishment that can affect the growth of young children and sometimes even death. Lack of nutrition can have effects on physical and mental health. Doordash and other food delivery services charge a lot of extra money for the convenience of having the food prepared and delivered. HelloFresh and other similar meal kit delivery services assist with solving the nutritional issue, however, their targeted audience is not the very budget-minded users. They add the convenience of delivering the food and providing you with the exact amount of ingredients for the recipe. That increases the cost of the service, and not being able to buy in bulk decreases the value a user can get. With the information available, we want to create a solution that targets budget-minded users who are more likely to spend their income on food cooked at home, while still being convenient. Our product will bring value in bringing accessible nutritional information and a wide catalog of recipes that caters to a broad audience.

User Interview

Background

Angela is an international student from Vietnam who does not know much about nutrition but wants to have a healthier lifestyle while staying within her tight budget. Some of her challenges include the difficulties of understanding what kind of benefits certain nutrition provides to the human body. All social media and other media outlets have contradicting advertisements about healthy food and oftentimes these meals are expensive to prepare or get. All the budget-friendly options that are easily accessible are usually low on nutrition and provide almost no benefits to the human body.

Alex is a domestic student born and raised in the Philippines his first ten years but later moved to the United States. Alex and his family quickly realized that the prices in the United States are much higher than in the Phillippines. Eating out was not a financially sustainable option but as a college student and living with a busy family, cooking at home was also a daunting task. He has a good knowledge of nutrition, but oftentimes these nutritious recipes require a lot of time to prepare and cost a lot of money.

Key Insights