ConsciousEats

A mobile and web-app helping urban consumers make more environmentally and socially conscious choices to support sustainable eateries in the city of London

We aim to help urban consumers make more conscious decisions to support restaurants with sustainable practices to reduce their individual environmental footprint. ConsciousEats is a web-app that pinpoints the location, price range, and various sustainability practices adopted by eateries in London (as a starting focal city).  By providing condensed information about several standard metrics  (ingredient sourcing, produce seasonality, animal welfare...etc.) based on publicly available data, a uniquely comprehensive sustainability score which covers both the environmental and social components of sustainability help customers combat the barrier of existing lack of transparency of information about processes involved from the farm to the table. Furthermore, the web-app will have gamified and interactive components, including a points system where regular customers can obtain discounts for loyalty. This will help generate greater motivation for customers to start and/or continue to make sustainability an important priority in their restaurant choices, contributing to a positive cycle of increased local support for sustainable eateries. In doing so, conscious consumption can help reduce individual environmental footprints

Food consumption drives a global food system responsible for natural resource exploitation, degradation, and over 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions. In the city of London, 890,000 tonnes of food is thrown away each year, and greenhouse gas emissions caused by the production, transportation, consumption and disposal of London's food are equivalent to 15,483 kilotons CO2 equivalent each year. The restaurant industry has worked hard to adopt some more sustainable practices, but this is not often considered by consumers when they eat out at restaurants because there is limited motivation to factor in the environment in their choices, and limited access to this information.

ConsciousEats targets students and young and/or middle-aged working professionals in London. These two user groups have accumulated awareness about the need to reduce individual environmental footprints and the threat of climate change, but remain unsure about how they can take individual action. Given that they will frequent restaurants in London at least once a month, ConsciousEats will help provide them both the incentive and the information required for them to make more conscious decisions to support restaurants and order specific menu items that are better for the planet.

We have conducted informal interviews and sent out a survey (which received 85 responses) to the target user demographic aged 20-35 (both students at Imperial College London and/or employed) in order to understand the key factors that inform their decision-making when eating out at restaurants, and what kinds of information they would want to know about a restaurant’s sustainability practices. Our findings validated the existence of the problem in London, the usefulness of our solution, and also informed us of what kinds of information the target user group wanted to know. We are in touch with Sustainable Restaurant Association who are already working with restaurants to introduce more sustainability practices; they have a range of restaurants that we can include within our restaurant network. We will continue to engage the potential users as we begin to prototype the app to gain their feedback to make the app as user-friendly as possible. 

We have conducted market research on our customer demographic, idea feasibility, and feedback from potential restaurant partners. We have begun to ideate on what the business model could look like, and pitched the concept at a few networking and pitching events held in London. We plan to prototype the app in mid 2022. 

ConsciousEats combines web and mobile application technology and game technology to create an engaging and interactive platform for users to eat more sustainably.

One individual eating sustainably has a relatively small societal benefit, but the bandwagon effect that this one individual produces encourages more users to change their eating habits, creating a larger collective impact that has a more pronounced societal benefit. Hence, a website and mobile application were chosen as the desired media for ConsciousEats as they are widely accessible, facilitating its use among its growing customer base.

However, a website on its own may only attract users who desire to eat more sustainably, as there is no real incentive for other users to use it. Hence, by creating a gamified mobile-app, the process of choosing a sustainable restaurant and eating sustainably is made more engaging and convenient. Furthermore, gamification enabled with mobile app technology can incorporate features such as game characters, a points system, and other interactive elements which can increase competition among consumer social networks as added incentives to learn more about sustainable food supply chains.

By combining the above two technologies, ConsciousEats makes eating sustainably more accessible and fun for all users, while genuinely having a positive societal impact. In the future, we hope to upgrade our gamification approach by integrating Augmented Reality, to provide a Pokemon Go style interactive game for navigating the city of London to find sustainable eateries, which could dramatically increase our user base.

We plan to serve 100 users next year, primarily university students studying in London, as we begin our prototyping phase, with potential to reach up to 150 as we scale up the prototyping.

Our team has two main impact goals for this year. Firstly, by providing users with the ability to find sustainable restaurants, our aim is to motivate them to consider different components of food sustainability which lead to more environmentally friendly eating habits, this is achieved through gamification of our app. The sustainability component is captured by a unique sustainability score, computed based on a proprietary framework which covers both environmental and social factors (e.g. local sourcing, packaging, fair staff wages). This score aims to be comprehensive and easy to understand by users, while also providing transparency about the factors and methodology used. When users are educated about factors such as Food Waste, Water Footprint, and Ingredient Sourcing of their food, they realize the scale of the problem they could be contributing to, which motivates them to eat more sustainably. Secondly, our goal is to increase transparency in restaurant sustainable practices through their annual reporting cycles. This could be done by increasing our team’s outreach to caterers and restaurants and conducting specific interviews to obtain further information about their sourcing and waste management processes. Restaurants can also be directed to the UK’s Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) for more guidance. The incentive for restaurants to consult SRA would be to gain more guidance so they can join our platform, which could increase their customer base. As future goals, we aim to encourage and inspire restaurants to adopt more sustainable practices and explore more sustainable sourcing methods.

Our progress of achieving our goals will be measured by quantitatively analyzing user and restaurant data, as well as qualitatively assessing our path of progress in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

To assess whether our users are learning about the factors related to sustainability, data can be collected based on how our initial users change their eating habits over time. For example, a trend can be sought related to whether a user chooses more animal welfare-friendly food after completing that section in the game component of ConsciousEats. This will help us improve the game elements and assess its efficacy. Our progress in this goal relates directly to SDG Goal 12: Sustainable consumption and production.

To determine our impact on restaurants’ transparency of sustainable practices, we can measure the number of new measures implemented over time, as well as qualitatively assess the awareness raised by the restaurant on their new practices. A simple and efficient way for restaurants to raise awareness is by comparing their new practices to goals such as 12.5, which deals with waste management and relates to restaurants implementing more sustainable packaging. Through this methodology, both us and the restaurant are helping to address SDG Goal 13.3, by improving education on climate change mitigation and impact reduction. 

To measure future goals, a similar methodology will be used as it provides a holistic method to evaluate the efficacy of our methods used to achieve our goals.

Some restaurants may be legally constrained to share data with us, which could limit our data set. Furthermore, some restaurants may not legally be required to share that data with us, and hence, may not do so, limiting our data set further. This creates a technical barrier as it is difficult to come up with a fair yet comprehensive system to determine how sustainable a restaurant is.

There may be difficulties obtaining a committed user group that would give  feedback about our prototype. Furthermore, implicit evaluations must be conducted given we are designing for behavioral change, which could take significant time to conduct and analyze. To overcome a part of this problem, we will first focus on the Imperial College community in order to establish a committed community who we are already familiar with. 

A potential cultural barrier could exist within the users, such as the lack of awareness or the lack of support for eating more sustainably. Also, there may be an uneven distribution of customer dietary requirements for religious or cultural reasons that constrain their ability to support more sustainable restaurants (such as halal meats). 

Our team is well-positioned to deliver this solution since we are both academically and culturally diverse. Coming from different countries and being students ourselves, we are driven by the problem statement and have been impacted by the challenge of understanding the local sustainable food landscape. Since we come from various backgrounds and hold different expertise, our team members are constantly learning from each other and can complement ideas and thoughts. Belinda is a youth leader of the global youth-led campaign Act4Food Act4Change, working directly to empower youth to pledge and take action to support the creation of more sustainable food systems. Avyay has been a vegetarian for 16 years, which places him in a great position to provide personal input regarding the requirements for accessibility of sustainable food and restaurants. He has done human centered design in the past, has designed for Augmented Reality and can code proficiently in Python. He has completed sustainability courses such as ‘Sustainable Product Design and the Innovation Ecosystem’ as part of the Harvard Secondary School Program, which taught him information about navigating the innovation ecosystem and sustainable design methodologies. Mia has been a Student Ambassador at Imperial for the past 2 ½ years and has experience communicating with and advertising to our first market focus – the students. She has also participated in multiple climate-focused hackathons, such as the London Climathon 2020 and the Hackdays Rhein-Neckar 2021 BASF Challenge which has increased her knowledge of sustainability issues. Her background in Chemical Engineering enables system scale-up thinking and heavy focus on problem-solving and consulting which are necessary skills for the development and implementation of our idea. Elizabeth is currently a MSc student in Environmental Data Science and Machine Learning, as she combines climate data analysis with machine learning methods.

We currently partner with the Sustainable Restaurant Association, which operates the Food Made Good programme in London. They work with restaurants in the hospitality sector to improve their sustainability practices. We are working with them to help promote restaurants within their network who are adopting sustainability practices in our app, and also drawing on their industry standard sustainability framework and Food Made Good Rating in our app design. 

N/A

N/A