MealMaiker
Project Overview
Background: Purdue’s chapter of Alpha Theta Delta, in partnership with Anji Mountain, organized a Design-A-Thon in April 2024. Anji Mountain is a furniture creation company that prioritizes developing sustainable, eco-friendly products, using local manufacturers and artisans.
Objective: Our design prompt was to ‘design a product that seamlessly integrates sustainable practice into daily kitchen activities. How can technology and service design create a more intuitive and engaging experience for managing waste, conserving resources, and preparing food sustainably?
Skills: Rapid Prototyping, 3D CAD, Primary & Secondary Research
Contributions: Ideation, Interviews, Secondary Research, and Physical Prototyping.
Research
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Narrowing the Scope
User Research
Market and Material
Final Product
The MealMaiker
MealMaiker has sustainable storage containers that are detatchable, easily cleanable, and can be paired with our app to make meal prepping effortless for our customers.
The containers come in three sizes:
Large – 1 cup (236.6 ml)
Medium – 2/3 cup (157.73 ml)
Small – 1/3 cup (78.86 ml)
Features
MealMaiker containers have the following features:
Encourage meal prepping: Through app integration (covered in the next section), it helps plan out meals so users can avoid that overwhelming feeling.
Easy to clean
Flexible business model: Users can buy one set of boxes which would have 1 Large, 1 Medium, and 1 Small, but they can also buy specific containers alone, which would inform the company on which containers users desire more.
Sustainable Materials
Connecting Boxes: The boxes connect to each other through sliding tracks with a locking mechanism to ensure stability and that they do not separate.
Customizable Portion Sizes: Every box can connect to each other which allows for the user to choose which boxes to use. For example, if the user simply wishes for a few carrots and sauce, they can use the small or medium sized boxes without having to pack the large box, saving on storage space
App Integration
One of MealMaiker’s most unique feature is the app integration. This app would help users plan out how much food to cook depending on how long they want it to last and how many containers they own. The general onboarding steps would be:
The user would create an account or log into the app. This is used to allow the user to save any recipes they like.
Next, they would put in the amount of each container they own and what their schedule for meal prep looks like.
Then, the user can browse for new recipes or choose one from ones they have saved and start cooking.
Personal Reflections
What I learned from this experience was the importance of delegating work and thinking creatively based on research. We had to prioritize different aspects of the project and change many ideas along the way as we realized different flaws or overlapping ideas. If we hadn’t assigned specific roles to everyone, there was a low chance that we would have accomplished everything that we did to that degree of detail.