Sofo

A food management tool for single households. Help on making smarter purchasing and consumption decisions based on their body needs to reduce food waste by understanding financial and nutritional value.

In the long run, we are promoting sustainable food management awareness and habits in single-person households to help reduce food waste.

My role: Designer, Researcher

My deliverables: Research, UX Solution, Visual design, User Interface, Prototyping, User testing, Storytelling

Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator

What’s the context?

“Most of the waste, however, is happening in our own kitchens. ReFed’s research shows that 43% of food wasted by weight – 27 million tons every year – occurs at home, especially in single households. American consumers are spending $144 billion dollars each year on food that they ultimately just throw in the trash.”

— About food waste. Move For Hunger. (n.d.). November 14, 2021

The solution

Introducing SOFO, a food management App that targets single-households and helps them make smarter decisions on food purchasing and consumption. In the long run to reduce food waste from their kitchen.

**1. Sign in & sync food inventory**
**Input body data and start recording calories intake**

Input health data to get a customized meal plan. Import inventory list from shopping history through scanning.

**3. Create a shopping list**
**Get shopping alert based on previous food waste history**

Check on items anywhere at any time to not repeat the purchase. Save time and effort with a smarter way to create shopping plans.

**2. Explore the recipe**
**Get recipe inspirations based on current inventory to clean-out fridge**

Explore recipes based on selected items on the inventory list. Get inspired to pair leftover foods and explore them as new recipes.

**4. Weekly check-in**
**Update food inventory weekly to record food waste**

Receiving weekly reminders to use up the food in their inventory, to remind users to finish their food when they are still fresh.

**5. Value loss report**
**Help to understand the financial and nutritional value**

In the long run, we are promoting a more sustainable food management awareness and habit among the user, understanding the financial and nutritional value by regularly reporting her personal list of lost and wasted food value items.

**6. Grow your virtual farm**
**Earn points to grow your own farm**

Growing a beautiful virtual farm with friends. Encouraging friends to join the zero food waste challenge and earn more points for the game.

The audience

Let’s meet kelly

Kelly lives alone and works a very busy schedule. She is looking for a healthier lifestyle and better ways to manage food to save money and energy. She also sometimes looks for cooking ideas to clean out her fridge because she is always buying too much and forgetting to eat it before it expires. Her busy schedule makes it difficult for her to balance time, energy, and money in buying and managing food.

How we can help Kelly?

Firstly, to further understand the problem, we mapped out the entire journey and converted it into five stages: including planning, purchasing, consuming, redistributing, and discarding. We found that Kelly's poor planning and over-purchasing always led to food expiration, which indirectly led to food waste and money waste, while over-preparation and food spoilage directly led to food waste.

Our theory of change

Food waste is a big theme, based on the previous research, we first narrowed down our scope to target single families, and used the theory of change as a tool to state out our long-term goal in order to ultimately make social change. The TOC statement will also serve as our standard to measure, plan, evaluate each design progress and decision we made.