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

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 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, our team realized that it is important to the business model to get the delivery of the coffee right.  Our priorities for this design are mostly on delivery, some on ordering experience, and we touch on future considerations (potential issues and future implementation).

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. In addition, riders are more flexible to how they commute. They 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.

There are options for delivery that the independent coffee shops can explore:

Third Party Delivery: Services are able to pick up orders and deliver.

Crowd Source: Create a service similar to UberEats where someone can pick up an order.

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.

Ordering

In order to maintain a coffee shop’s unique experience (sights, sounds, smells), we wanted to redefine the ordering experience with our Joe on the Go app.  In it, you will see how we took specific steps of the coffee-brewing process and integrated it with a custom ordering experience. Further, you will see how we uphold coffee shop values to maintain customers’ connection to the source of their food (in this case, beans).

The Design

Based on our insights, we determined the following features are essential to our solutions’s success:

Maintain superior quality of coffee

Connect customer with the source of their coffee

Convey the coffee shop’s values

Delivery

Ordering

In order to maintain a coffee shop’s unique experience (sights, sounds, smells), we wanted to redefine the ordering experience with our Joe on the Go app.  In it, you will see how we took specific steps of the coffee-brewing process and integrated it with a custom ordering experience. Further, you will see how we uphold coffee shop values to maintain customers’ connection to the source of their food (in this case, beans).