JOE ON THE GO
Off-premise dining experience project for Relish Works
The Prompt
Off-premise dining is ordering food from a restaurant and eating it anywhere other than at the restaurant’s table. Whether it’s ordering take out, getting delivery, or visiting a food truck, off-premise dining has grown significantly in recent years through the rise of GrubHub, Uber Eats, Btown Menus, and other services. As consumers continue to demand convenience and speed, off-premise dining is increasing with 86% of consumers using some form of off-premise dining.
The challenge is to understand how off-premise dining has impacted restaurant operators, specifically independent food services (i.e. not chains). My team must identify the largest negative impact to the restaurant operator and create a concept that addresses that pain point.
Relish Works
Relish Works is an innovation hub focused on challenging the status quo and pioneering the next evolution of the food industry. While backed with the support of an established and profitable food service organization, Gordon Food Service, Relish Works operates as an independent start-up focused on user-centered solutions. Their efforts explore improvements to the established company’s core business as well as solving for unmet customer needs and developing new businesses.
Constraints
Relish Works is not interested in learning about chain restaurants or traditional takeout/delivery joints that have been doing off-premise dining for years (i.e. pizza, Chinese, and similar restaurants). Rather, use these restaurants as inspiration for the concept and instead examine shops that have adopted off-premise dining in response to trends in consumer behavior.
Pairing with other teams to all visit the same restaurant can save time, but it also pigeon-holes your research. The challenged us to explore the non-obvious restaurants and collaborate as a class to ensure you all are talking to different restaurants (use your in-class Slack channel to coordinate your efforts).
Target Audience
The local coffee shops we want to focus on are independent, non-chain coffee shops. These coffee shops can do more than coffee, but they have a serious focus on coffee - they are part of the “third wave” coffee crafters. They take coffee seriously.
We chose these specific shops because we believe the demand for crafted coffee deliveries will be from millennials who are loyal to high-quality, local coffee.
Research
INterview with expert
Conducted a hour-long interview with David, the manager of The Pourhouse Cafe, a local non-profit coffee shop in Bloomington, Indiana. Here are the takeaways:
Transporting coffee is a challenge: Pourhouse does not deliver or do smaller scale off-premise catering due to the challenge of transporting coffee which is delicate and must have its temperature maintained to ensure quality.
Maintaining values is necessary: As a non-profit, Pourhouse upholds values of generosity, exceptional quality, and connection with the coffee making process, and these values currently can’t be conveyed through delivery.
Coffee quality is paramount: Independent coffee shops like Pourhouse emphasize quality first and foremost, and this movement towards quality will only grow. It is imperative that shops are able to sell a quality product.
Secondary
Delivery: More and more companies across industries are investing in delivery. Additionally, 45% of adults say that they will increase their online ordering of food from restaurants. https://hospitalitytech.com/online-ordering-tech-trends-2018
The Need: “Consumer interest in food delivery is up year over year, and across restaurant brands tested, with the greatest incremental interest in coffee and burger chains” https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/online-food-delivery-market-expands
Temperature: While maintaining temperatures in plastic or paper cups is challenging, double-walled vacuum flask technology can maintain liquid temperatures for up to 24 hours https://www.hydroflask.com/explore/innovation
KEY INSIGHTS
Delivery will be the new norm: The trend toward delivery is only increasing, and coffee shops will need to adapt to this business model.
Logistical and ideological barriers: Independent coffee shops are kept from delivery due to challenges in not only quality assurance but conveying values.
Connection between customers and coffee: To demonstrate quality and convey values, coffee shops want to foster a closer connection between customers and their coffee
From these insights, we created a question to help us focus on a design solution:
“How can independent cafes deliver coffee while maintaining product quality and conveying their values to their customers?”
From the question, the answer to the question above was created. It’s important to coffee shop managers to maintain the atmosphere of the shop, so the ordering coffee experience is important to think about. That said, it is important to the business model to get the delivery of the coffee right. The priorities for this design are mostly on delivery and ordering experience
Ordering
It is essential to redefine the ordering experience with Joe on the Go app. To maintain the value of the coffee shop, the app takes the user through the coffee brewing process and has embodied the ordering experience at the cafe. Connecting the customers to information about their bean of choice and customizing their order.
Ordering Process
The mobile ordering system features an enjoyable experience brought by visual and sound cues to convey the idea of the ‘craft’ of coffee to customers.
After selecting “Customize Order”, the User can select from different coffee beans and they have the opportunity of learning more about them.
Click to choose the bean. There will be animations with sound effects showing the grinding process. Customers can skip the animation and move on to the next step anytime.
To simulate the idea of making your own coffee, one will have to swipe the bag of coffee beans to the grinder. Afterwards, the next step is add creamer and shots of espresso.
Customers can choose how many shots they want in their coffee by clicking on adding and removing shots.
The app will update the customers with real-time order status and provide the estimated time remains.
Delivery
To continue the experience of getting coffee outside of the cafe and deliver the coffee efficiently, we recommend creating a bike delivery platform that is similar to the services of UberEats, DineDash, and GrubHub. With concerns of sustainability, delivery on bike provides a cleaner option for transportation and riders can maneuver through traffic and utilize bike lanes and paths which allows them to dodge traffic. This will lead to faster deliveries while maintaining the quality of the coffee.
Independent coffee shops can explore:
Third Party Delivery: Services are able to pick up orders and deliver. (i.e. UberEats, Grubhub)
Employee at Cafe: Create a new role for the cafe, knows the culture/brand of the shop, able to keep the thermoses and other products (this help with reuse and prevents loss of these products) and becomes a mobile barista.
The team found making the employee at the cafe more beneficial than the others due the ability to expand the culture and brand of the store outside of the physical location and more.