Open IDEO Submission: DeliverEase - Automated grocery delivery straight to your fridge
Fall 2020, Independently
This challenge that calls into question single use plastic is timely, given it’s increased presence during the Covid pandemic. We’ve undoubtedly seen examples of this in our own everyday lives: an increase in PPE equipment disposed of incorrectly (a waste stream the public never even had before), copious amounts of deliveries requiring more packaging than ever, coupled with the fact that sanitation needs have caused the replacement of reusable items - like office dishware and creative reusable to-go containers - with single-use items instead. Reusable grocery bags are discouraged because of hygiene - stores are opting for single use. New York city had an anticipated a ban on single use plastic bags slated for March 1st 2020 that is now on hold.
When it comes to bag types, there is no perfect solution. While the plastic bag gets a lot of bad press, it is waterproof and not environmentally intensive to make. However, it is rarely recycled correctly and leaks into the environment. On average each plastic bag consumed is used for only 12 minutes. While paper bags are more effectively recycled, they actually need to be reused several times to make up for their energy extraction cost. And while bio-degradable bags have a lot of potential in the future, most cities do not currently have an infrastructure that allows them to safely compost. While reusable plastic bags and canvas bags both boast high re-use potential, the energy required to make them is also high and cotton production additionally requires pesticides, fertilizers, land, and water, and results in environmental contamination, soil erosion, etc.
In order to determine how people can potentially live without bags, I asked how do people currently use them? I chose to specifically focus on the act of buying groceries. In terms of innovation, I wanted to focus on the users for whom grocery shopping revolves around a car and a house, and get inspired by early adopters who are interested in the environment and design. However, I wondered if that would be really be impactful?
Maybe it’s because I live in a city but I was surprised by the data that 72% of Americans live in single-family homes (as opposed to apartments) and over 93% have access to cars. Based on this, I thought that focusing on a model involving the car and home actually seemed to make sense. However, I do want to acknowledge that those who do not have single family homes and cars are probably systematically marginalized groups of colors in this country and I want to address that as part of this design solution.
While it is important to understand the human interaction around shopping (we are always focused on the human of course), I wanted to look at the journey of the groceries themselves. They do plenty of travel without bags - they are gently collected from shelves, travel around in a cart, and ease their way down a conveyor belt. For some reason it is only upon leaving the store, that there is a stigma that they then require bags as containers. Wholesale companies like Costo and Bjs, however, have never provided bags. Somehow people have always dealt with getting these “naked” groceries to their car and into their homes. And this didn’t change during the pandemic.
What these stores are doing isn’t crazy - providing bags is a relatively new concept. We don’t have to go too far back in history to think of a time before bags. Today people use a variety of bag types, and those types are mainly dictated by the consumer’s response to the question ‘paper or plastic?’. But – before Safeway and Kroger integrated the plastic bag ubiquitously, before the bag dominated the European market, before the single use bag was patented – providing bags in grocery stores was not common. People would bring their own bags, baskets, and bowls to get goods home. If you didn’t want to carry your purchases yourself, local delivery was common dating back as early as the late 1800s. Local stores often managed and executed their own delivery systems. Before Bloomingdales’ big brown bag, the delivery truck was the original branding opportunity of transporting goods. Probably the longest holdover of this original delivery system was milk delivery from the local ‘milk man’ in glass jars that were then collected and reused.
Delivery of groceries has begun to resurge and is now increasing dramatically due to Covid. In a survey by an independent strategic advisory firm, Americans spent 6.6 billion dollars on groceries in May 2020 alone, up by more than a billion dollars from April, even as people began remerging from pandemic shelter-in-place orders. Compared to August 2019, more customers are shopping online, placing more orders, and spending more per order. This trend is expected to continue.
For more inspiration from the past, I was intrigued when I saw a 1957 GE refrigerator ad for a large scale built in fridge: it’s not simply an object you buy and have delivered, but rather an integrated system that shapes the entire design of your kitchen. We can imagine the “early adopters” of the 50s and 60s – those on the cutting edge of technology at the time – welcoming this into their home. This also serves as an interesting example for the layout and design of a kitchen and home around pantries and food storage.
Today, smart refrigerators can tell you exactly what’s in your fridge, what you should use soon because it’s approaching expiration, and what you are running low on. What if that translated directly to a grocery list in an app, that popped-up to ask for your order approval? With whatever tweaks you wanted to make based on taking a look in your fridge in real time from anywhere, and upon confirming your order, it would be sent directly to your local grocery store. Donating delivery time would be the default setting and eliminates a service fee, meaning your personal autonomous vehicle would spend an hour delivering orders to those living in food deserts before delivering your order to you.
At the store, an employee or gig worker (i.e. instacart) collects your items into a cart, scanning as they go. The app analyzes the planogram of the store and guides the grocer along the most effective route possible. That grocery worker then loads the order into your driverless car that had left your house and backed into the loading dock (“micro fulfillment center”) at the store. Over time, the grocery worker could be surpassed by an autonomous cart that shops itself and then loads the car, or even the autonomous car driving down the aisles and collecting the groceries right off the shelves.
When the car arrives home it backs into the garage and uses a fold out ‘grocery escalator’ that extends from it's trunk to put groceries directly into your fridge and pantry that has openings from both inside (kitchen-side) and outside (garage-side). DeliverEase app groups orders together by product (like a Grocery Share) and location (like Uber pool) to increase efficiency, reducing overall number of trips to the store and therefore carbon emissions.