Team Food Connection: Connecting Home Cooks to Older Adult Neighbors
The story of how one team of Fellows created a platform to enable people to connect through food
On Thursday, May 7th, 2020 the Fung Fellowship community gathered online for the virtual First Year Fellow Project Showcase. At the event, nine teams of fellows pitched projects after reiterating, interviewing, prototyping, and synthesizing for months in conjunction with partners Tin Can Associates, SF Tech Council, OLLI@Berkeley, and CareMerge.
We had the opportunity to talk with Food Connection, a team who developed a food delivery platform that connects older adults with home cooks who can provide ethnic cuisines. They partnered with Leah Edwards and Jonathan Denholtz from Tin Can Associates, an SF-based business consultancy specializing in ed-tech and mission-driven organizations, who provided the initial proposal and support for the team throughout the project.
Fellows Fahad Paryani, Dorsa Moslehi, Marwat Al-Olefi, Caroline Chen, and Nikole Slaton shared the story behind their final product.
How did your project start? What was the original “How Might We” question?
“We were working with Tin Can Associates, and their initial idea was how can we help older adults age at home independently. That was the big picture that was presented to us. Essentially, our ‘How Might We’ question was:
“How might we help older adults age in place independently through a healthy home delivery system?”
What was the timeframe of the project?
We began the project in late February, and had about two months to work on the product. Compared to our previous design challenges, this was our longest challenge in terms of timeframe. We knew we had to meet specific milestones, ranging from market research to design of prototypes to testing and surveying solutions to creating a second-draft product to making the business plan.
The first thing we did was build a project plan that had a timeline of how we wanted to get to the final presentation. We wanted to make sure that we did enough interviews and user research to understand the market space, what older adults were in need of, and how we could build a platform that would actually meet their needs.
What were your first steps when considering the problem?
Our first step when we got the prompt was to conduct interviews. Really, that’s the first thing you should do. We were at home so we had limited access to who we could interview, but we just did our best and conducted interviews with the older adults we knew around us. Our initial interviews were very broad; we just asked about daily life routines, struggles, what their priorities were, challenges — vague things because we were going in without any specific ideas.
After we conducted those interviews, we had a meeting and shared our findings with each other. From there we honed in on a couple specific ideas that could fit our “How Might We.”
[1] Furniture designed to be more friendly to older adults without sacrificing looks.
[2] Older-adult-friendly cookware, again without sacrificing looks, since that is something lacking in the market
[3] A rough initial version of our food delivery platform.
We shared our ideas with Tin Can and conducted more interviews. Initially, we had some trouble because we wanted to pack all our ideas into one solution, but after discussing with our Tin Can mentors, Leah Edwards and Jonathan Denholtz, we decided it would be best to really focus on one, and make a more elaborate, impactful, and detailed plan.
At the end of the day, we came to our final idea by evaluating the similarities and differences between the all the interviews we had and identifying key patterns and user needs. Based on what we found, we decided to move forward with the food delivery platform idea.
“We came to our final idea by evaluating the similarities and differences between the all the interviews we had and identifying key patterns and user needs.”
What were the user needs/patterns that led your team to the Food Connection solution?
We realized through interviews that a lot of older adults were missing home-cooked foods that are ethnic-based, or they tended to eat outside, but now with COVID-19 were unable to use that option as frequently. For example, Fahad’s grandmother had a lot of appetite issues; she’d only want to eat South Asian foods.
We saw complaints about people’s inability to cook, mainly due to pain, such as arthritis. So if older adults can’t cook and eat out right now, where will they get food? The food delivery systems available for them didn’t have a diverse range of options — what was lacking in the market was something that could cater to their specific cultural and ethnic preferences and health needs.
We wanted to keep it new, exciting, and refreshing at the same time, without lacking nutritional needs. We were thinking about foods for diabetic needs, cardiovascular needs. That made our platform so interesting and appealing to older adults — the fact it addressed their health needs along with their cultural, dietary, and ethnic preferences.
“What was lacking in the market was something that could cater to their specific cultural and ethnic preferences and health needs.”
What challenges did you face in fleshing out your solution?
There were three main challenges in coming up with a complete solution:
[1] Safety and logistical implementation
One of the first obvious questions we had in our minds was the logistical implementation and safety issue. How would we plan out a food delivery system in a community-based way with oversight, and deal with the legal issues?
In the beginning stages, we were hesitant. But we researched another food delivery system in Oakland called Josephine that had started a really similar platform, engaging home cooks and the community — but ended up shutting down due to legal challenges and lack of resources. We wanted to take a spin on this and cater it towards older adults.
We found while doing this research that our solution was now legal. A bunch of community members had lobbied for a platform allowing home cooking chefs to cater from their homes as long as they met specific requirements. Now there’s legislation in California called AB626 which provides guidelines, licenses, and safety measures which allow home cooks to cook at home. We took this legislation to convince our audience that there were policies that backed us up legally.
[2] Technology Literacy
Another thing we wanted to keep in mind was technology literacy — whether older adults would be comfortable with using online platforms. When we were conducting our interviews, we found that a lot of older adults were really comfortable using the internet on a computer, but preferred not to use apps. We took that into mind and when we were designing our wireframes, we made a really friendly desktop app.
[3] Competitor Research
After we narrowed down our product to a home delivery system, we tried to model it after food delivery systems on the market. Caroline looked into popular home delivery systems like Uber Eats and Postmates. We developed a graph that compares all the different models that these businesses have used. We wanted to see what prices the market was selling at. Through that we were able to develop two types of plans, a subscription plan and a pay-per-meal plan. In addition, through user research, we were able to see what older adults would be willing to pay instead of randomly coming up with prices.
What was your team workflow like?
When we first began, we were meeting in person, but then shifted to Zoom or Google Hangouts after shelter-in-place went into effect. Fahad lives in another state, so we had to adjust to different time zones. We kept a weekly meeting time and an ongoing agenda. We’d set goals of what we wanted to see done by the next week and keep action items for each person.
We also had a point-person system where each person had a specific and designated role. For example, someone was in charge of scheduling meeting invites with our mentors or making our weekly meetings. Our first mentor meeting with Tin Can did not actually happen because we missed the invite. So we made sure we never made that same mistake. Because of these roles and the ongoing agenda, we were able to keep ourselves organized and accountable, especially given shelter-in-place.
How was working with Tin Can and any other partners you had?
It was nice having a more personal relationship with them; they were really involved with our project. One of the things we tried to do before our bi-monthly meetings with them was to create an agenda that they could see the day or night before of what we wanted to talk about. We had lots of conversations and brainstorming sessions with them, especially about different ways to do more user research, considering that our target population was older adults and given COVID-19.
In addition, in our team meetings, sometimes we’d get held up on our ideas and not see solutions or issues, or we’d have doubts. It was really nice to have them there as an additional resource to talk to, like a sounding board. They wanted us to constantly ask ourselves, “Does this product actually help older adults — is this something they actually need?”
We also met with an MPH student, Hannah Mack, who was focusing on the food platform; she’s the one who introduced us to AB626. Because we got a graduate student who was an expert on this topic, we were able to see that our platform was possible and manageable, and actually needed by the immigrant community, who would love to make a monetary profit out of it.
Were there any difficult phases of the project?
In the second phase, post-midterm deliverable, we wanted to get more user research in. Since Tin Can challenged us to figure out if this platform was actually something that people would use, the more people we could get to take our survey, the more we could learn about users. But this was really, really difficult for us. We wanted to gather a variety of people from all over, and do online research on two groups, community cooks and older adults, because we wanted to gauge interests on both sides.
So we had to get creative. We went on Facebook Marketplace and saw that people were selling food there on the platform, even though it’s not exactly set up for them to do that. We reached out to some of those people and asked them if they would be interested in a more standardized platform. For the older adult population, we tried to find Facebook groups that we could join. It was really hard to get people involved and do our surveys. This was during the period when COVID-19 first hit and everyone was going home. That was one of our biggest challenges.
Do you have any plans to continue this project? If so, what are you working on?
We haven’t really discussed this yet. Tin Can did express a lot of interest in potentially continuing this project, whether it be with our group or a new group. It might be that other people decide to take it on, maybe a mixture of us and some new people. The most ideal way to continue would be through the Honors program. It was interesting to figure out that our platform was unique in catering to older adults, so there is that market, should we continue.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
Something funny about our team is that for this design challenge, the fellows had the freedom to pick the projects and team members. There was a survey we were supposed to fill out to do so. But our team ended up being people who didn’t fill out the survey and got clumped together. We were the only five who didn’t do it. It was really awkward at first, but it worked out well.
Overall, this project was a great way to conclude the first year of the Fellowship in spite of everything that was going on. Indirectly, our project lined up with the concerns raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. At this time, there’s the questions of how can we make sure older adults have consistent access to the food they need while staying safe? Similarly, we noticed a lot of other teams consider how how their projects could also affect issues raised by COVID-19, and adjust their platforms in response. It was interesting to see how our product could be especially useful in this time, and it was a great experience to dive deep into one project.
This product was also cool in that we were able to help two different audiences. One, older adults who want to live independently and age in place, but are unable to cook at home or grocery shop. Two, home cooks who are fantastic at cooking but don’t want to or can’t get into the cooking industry. This is a good way for immigrant or low-income community members to hop on the app and practice something they love. We were able to help both communities help each other.”
“This product was also cool in that we were able to help two different audiences. One, older adults who want to live independently and age in place…Two, home cooks who are fantastic at cooking but don’t want to or can’t get into the cooking industry... We were able to help both communities help each other.”
Connect with the team: Fahad Paryani, Marwat Al-Olefi, Dorsa Moslehi, Caroline Chen, and Nikole Slaton.
Edited by Lauren Leung
Applications for the Fung Fellowship are now open for the UC Berkeley transfer class of 2022 until July 31, 2021.
Learn more about the Fung Fellowship at fungfellows.berkeley.edu.
