Sustainable bites: connecting consumers with ethical food choices
Have you ever wondered where your food really comes from? Or how you can make more sustainable choices without breaking the bank? You’re not alone! Many people, like Maria, want to eat healthier, support ethical markets, and reduce their environmental impact — but face challenges like unclear labels and limited access to truly sustainable options.
That’s why we’ve explored real consumer experiences and designed a simple solution: an app that connects you to trusted local markets, provides clear sustainability info, and helps you shop smarter. It’s not about reinventing the wheel, but about making sustainability easier for everyone.
Join me in this journey toward a better food future!
Brief presentation of the project
Food sustainability faces challenges like high costs, corporate exploitation, and limited accessibility. Research shows that consumers value proximity, trust, and transparency in food choices, with community influence playing a key role. Interviews revealed frustrations with unclear labeling and greenwashing, leading to the creation of a user persona, Maria (our persona), who seeks ethical and sustainable food options but struggles with misleading information and availability.
A proposed app aims to connect consumers with sustainable markets, offering location-based recommendations, certification transparency, and educational content. User testing emphasized the importance of credibility, ratings, and clear sustainability indicators. While not a novel concept, the app provides a practical solution for finding reliable organic products. Future research will explore how community events can further promote sustainable consumer habits.
Taking a global view of the context
In order to solve this problem, the first step is to have more knowledge about it. Therefore, we started to look for information on the internet: blogs, publications, people familiar with the matter, etc.
We came to the conclusion that in recent years there has been growing awareness on the importance of good nutrition and the responsibility of the population to focus on good nutrition. Organic food is not available to everyone, but only to those who can afford it (high prices). In addition, supermarket chains and other large companies benefit from the organic food market and conscious customers, but do not actually solve the situation, but increase the gap and impact consumers with unsustainable models.
Moreover, we were curious to know the needs and expectations before the different factors that could play an important role in their purchases. At this point, we developed different hypotheses in this respect:
People have a basic and general knowledge about food sustainability.
People’s main motivation for shopping is proximity, as it saves time, effort, transport costs and reduces stress.
Sustainable food depends on trust and transparency between producers and consumers about the origin of food.
Consumers more readily adopt sustainable habits when their community promotes them through events, campaigns or shared initiatives.
Qual research
To confirm or disprove these hypotheses, we conducted in-depth interviews with a specific profile: people living in Spain, specifically in a city with a population of more than 2 million inhabitants, middle class (20–40k), regular buyers of organic products and with a high technological profile.
The interviews led us to different themes and common needs such as the lack of information about the processes and regulations around sustainable products and the great interest shown in improving education and programmes that help to raise awareness about it. Therefore, the main themes revolved around:
Everyday habits must be simple and accessible
I work and with the girls, I need it to be something simple, like recycling, for example
Clear benefits and rewards are essential to maintain new sustainable habits
If they assure me that they have benefits or that even in those shops they can give me discounts, you know, like loyalty programmes? Something like that
Sustainability knowledge influences food purchasing decisions
I need to have guarantees, to know what I am buying. I cannot be told that these tomatoes are called ‘La huerta de Granada’ and then I read on the label the origin and they are from Morocco.
Pedagogy and campaigns are needed to educate consumers on sustainable practices and choices
It’s been a few years now, but i went to courses given by the city council that were about gardening and composting. i have my own vegetable garden on the terrace, it’s not much, but that knowledge helped me to get it started.
Meet out persona
A persona is a fictional but realistic description of a typical or target user of the product. Therefore, we are going to introduce you to Maria:
To be successful with our product we try to understand the needs of our persona. In this case, we wanted to capture our findings through three key characteristics of her:
Goals
Motivations
Needs
Pain Points
Maria’s main goal is to know where products come from, to choose seasonal and plant-based products and to participate in community sustainability initiatives to promote health and environmental responsibility. Therefore, many of the actions she takes are related to prioritising organic and chemical-free products, supporting ethical and local markets, promoting sustainability education for children and staying motivated by health, savings and community benefits.
This requires promoting transparency in product information, simplifying access to sustainable food, clarifying certification labels, providing educational resources, strengthening regulation and supporting meal planning to reduce waste and encourage responsible consumption.
However, it faces a number of frustrating situations such as navigating time constraints, limited access to quality organic markets, greenwashing, and unclear labelling that pose challenges to ethical and sustainable purchasing.
From challenges to solutions: brainstorming phase.
Given the frustrations shown by Maria, we are faced with the following problem:
Keeping our problem statement in focus, the initial step towards a potential solution is to let go of limiting beliefs and dive back into brainstorming. The aim was to use creative techniques like “Crazy 8s”.
We ended up with many ideas, but all of them around the creation of an app that would contain different information such as being able to see the establishments near the location, updated and accurate information about sustainability (tips, educational campaigns, etc.), tips to avoid waste and connect producers with final consumers.
Going with the flow
Therefore, we focused on the whole process that the app could go through, so that it would meet all the requirements Maria wanted:
However, we realised that it was not feasible to generate a project of these characteristics, so we wanted to zoom in on a specific objective and we focused on NEARBY. So our final task flow was as follows:
Developing wireframes
By defining different options and decisions, we facilitated the creation of our first low-fidelity wireframes. We wanted to create a screen for each of the processes, so we had to consider which elements to include in each of them.
In the following example, we took the user flow to get to the final facility information:
Open app — Main screen (home page) — Maps — Location — Local markets near — Select a market — Info about what they sell — Seasonal products
Directly focus on the concept
After generating our first sketch, our next step was to find out if our prototype is going in the right direction towards actually being a solution to our users, so we decided to get down to it.
We decided to conduct a concept test with four people. This technique helped us to detect the acceptance of our idea and to find out if it met Maria’s needs and solved her frustrations. After carrying out these interviews, we downloaded the information and came to the following conclusions:
We had to put more focus on the importance that users gave to the credibility part such as the ratings of other customers and the valuation of these markets. In addition, they attached great importance to being able to directly see the sustainability certifications of the establishment as such, which is at a glance. Therefore, our final low-fi design was as follows:
Next steps…
Although this app was not original or anything new for our users, we found it to be a good answer and solution to find reliable establishments that sell seasonal and quality products.
As it is not accessible/conventional information, I would use it again because it gives me info about organic products, and information about accessible places nearby
For other phases of the project, I would like to look into the topic of events, especially campaigns, to find out what users’ interests are in this respect: what they want to know, what information they would like to see, etc.