Blog

Introducing League of Meals

Posted on 20th February 2012 by Adil Abrar -

We're going to start doing Weeknotes for a new Sidekick venture we've been working on since last summer part-time, but which we're now ramping up. We can't promise that these will be complete, or even coherent. They'll be a reflection of what has happened in the week, and there'll be an invitation for feedback and help. Which I suspect we're going to need quite a lot of. 

Before we tell you what the idea is, we better start with the problem. 

A problem that matters

We're getting older. All of us. As a country. There are now 11m people over the age of 65. This creates all kinds of issues - not enough people working, too many requiring care, social isolation, intergenerational conflict...the list is long. The direction of travel has to be enabling people to stay independent, for longer. It's what the State needs, but it's also what the individuals need. We answered a competition call from the Design Council and TSB, who were particularly interested in how we enable people to keep independent through food, given that what people eat, when they eat, who they eat with etc is such a big part of life. 

Little-big idea

Our start point was based on my own real life experience. I have an older neighbour. Kathy. She's lovely. She lives on her own and she's fairly independent. But she doesn't have a car, and we do. Which means that we sometimes go pick up bulky items (washing powder, toilet roll) for her when go do a supermarket shop. Problem is, we need to know what she wants before we go, and if we just go, on the spur of the moment, we often think 'I wonder what Kathy would have wanted.' 

The little idea we had was a collaborative shopping list application. The older person uses a mobile or web app to create a list of the things they need from the shops at any one time, and all the people in their network can see what they need, and pick it up, if it's convenient for them. Simple. It's like a shared 'to buy' list. 

The big idea was what we called 'distributed care'. Taking its cue from the notion of distributed computing, where there are many, low-end computers, that share the processing burden, we loved the idea of Distributed Care, where there are many individuals doing a small amount of work, reducing the burden on any one person AND reducing the risk of a complete system failure. That sounded kind of cool, and we could see how we could start with shopping, but it could also be about sharing travel, or chores, or visits. We called it Pick Me Up (gettit? pick me up food, pick me up in the car, pick me up emotionally...it was a sweet name) and we played around with ideas involving using a stylus and a tablet, and sending updates to SMS not just smartphones. 

On the back of this, Design Council and TSB were good enough to offer us a small amount of feasibility funding. 

No plan survives contact with the enemy

Our next step before we built anything was to go out and find out if anyone actually wanted it, and would anyone pay for it. We did a bunch of workshops, interviews and rapid prototypes, and we found the answer. No. 

There are too many reasons to go into but the main one was this. There were some people who really felt they needed this, but they were also the same people who had more complex needs, and who were already 'dependent' on others. They also tended to be older and more tech averse. Meanwhile, those that were still independent - we called them the young-old - they hated it. They really hated it because it treated them like victims, and as we know from The Amazings, it is far better to focus on what older people could do, as opposed to what they can't.

In this instance, these people loved shopping, they knew what they wanted better than anyone else, they knew how to get it cheaper than anyone else, and going to the shops was actually a really good reason to get out of the house and er, be independent. Our solution - well meaning as it was - was more likely to make people more dependent. 

Problem-solution fit

But in the process of telling us how much they hated what we were proposing, they did tell us what they really wanted and what they were good at.

They wanted social food opportunities. Special occasions when they eat with other people. These moments were not just more enjoyable, but these were times that they tended to cook nicer, healthier food. And the best thing was that these people had something that others don't have - knowledge of heritage recipes. They can cook. They can cook things that the rest of us have probably forgotten or don't know how to cook. Everyone loves nan's cooking. And nan's cooking was at the heart of keeping nan active and independent through food. 

The new idea was simple. Eat Better Together.

It was a digital service that brings together friends, families, and communities together to enjoy heritage recipes cooked by older adult experts. Importantly, the emphasis is squarely on the meal occasion. We're not trying to create a database of recipes, we're trying to create social interaction and wellbeing.

Hence, The League of Meals. 

Here is a high-level user journey / user story that we created. I especially liked the idea of nan snapping her recipes written on scraps of photos, and people in the network transcribing them. That would have been sweet. 

Product-market fit (hypothesis)

We loved the idea of bringing families together to eat nan's delicious food. We could see how it solved the problem. It sounded like something that people would want to engage in. And it felt just fun enough for people to get behind it. 

The key issue - as it always is - was the customer challenge. Who was going to pay for it? Would older people pay for a service that enabled them to cook for others? Doubt it. Would others pay for a tool that helped them organise meals? Maybe, but why not use Facebook? Could it be something that a local authority would pay for? Possibly, but we have to be mindful of the current climate of cuts. Potentially, it could be an education project where young children are invited to connect to their elders as part of Home Economics (is that what it's still called?). Another thought we had was around reminiscence therapy for people with early stage dementia - there was some evidence that we came across which suggested that helping people with dementia remember the things that they could remember, such as recipes, could be an important part of their treatment. 

That brings us to where we were at earlier this month, and where the lovely Johanna Kollmann joined the team to help us unpick the product and turn it into an amazing startup that solves a problem that matters.  There's been a number of developments since, but I'll leave it to the team to pick up the story. Hope you enjoyed the read and the thinking so far. We're pretty excited by where this leads.