The Story

senior thesis story

Finished!

I haven’t posted my development since last post, which has been a lot.

Meeting with business professor Russ Wigh
Business Proposal
Container design and prototype
Process book
Presentation
For now you can view my final presentation on-line. This is the last presentation of my college career at SCAD!

And for the final process book!: The final deliverable!

Starfish Cafe

Starfish Cafe counter table

To make my reusable take-out container plausible, I want to sell it as a business model for an existing local restaurant here in town. I thought about Starlander Cafe, Sentient Bean, Zunzi’s, among others, and David recommended I check out Starfish Cafe.

Entering Starfish Cafe

This restaurant is a product of Union Mission and Savannah Technical College. They train students who were once homeless or part of Union Mission’s programs to be part of the workplace. You walk in and everyone immediately says “Welcome to Starfish Cafe”.

As you can see the layout is interesting. The kitchen is open to the public. The staff is friendly. The food is delicious.

Starfish Cafe

I spoke with Chef. Every month they order two crates of take-out containers, a total of 200 pieces of plastic clamshell containers for 35$ each crate.

This is as wonderful program addressing a serious issue especially in Savannah, in a constructive manner. I am not sure if this is the target market that would work best as a model for my system since their focus is different then mine, but their positive attitude and local community-driven efforts make it an attractive opportunity.

Check-point Presentation 05/12

I presented to the class my process thus far in a seven minute presentation. Since my process was a little hectic in terms of how I began (extremely vague) and all the observations and inspirational research, I thought it was appropriate to use Prezi, “a zooming editor for stunning presentations”, because of its jumbled, jumping-around style.

You can view my presentation here. Just click the arrows on the bottom-right corner to go from one idea to the next. It was more effective when you have me leading you through this jumble of thoughts.

The feedback from my supervisor, David, was to create the system around the sanitation aspect. Because of FDA regulations, a restaurant has limits as to whether they can use a container a customer brought from home or not, so ideally they would provide the sanitation process of it as well. But many times no one wants to clean someone else’s mess or they might not even have a big enough washware appliance or space to store all these containers. An idea, then, would be to base this system around the cleaning aspect, allowing businesses to out-source it (much like many do with cleaning their table linens and rags).

Next deliverable: Business model and a package design for the container.

Analysis: Local Nation Reusable Take-out Container System

Since I want to focus on a reusable take-out container system, I revisited the Local Nation and analyzed its flow and the opportunities for improvement in it.

Local Nation Flow Analysis

There are a few details that need further development: how many containers should a business initially order? How do you keep customers from taking more than one container/how do you keep customers from bringing containers back for reuse and proper sanitation?

I also previously spoke with the managers at the dining halls here at SCAD and they mentioned a reusable take-out container system. St. Leo’s University has implemented this in their dining halls. Clearly, it’s more cost-effective than the more expensive disposable biodegradable corn-based containers.

Reusable container system at St. Leo's

So, how do I implement this system that already exists in a college campus into a bigger scale of restaurants or businesses in a town or city?

I want to work with an existing local business here in Savannah to use them as model for the system I would like to implement. Final deliverables: Business model and a packaged design for the containers.

Solutions matrix

Below is a matrix of the possible solutions in take-out (mostly in relation to the packaging, as that is the main issue, although part of the large portions is somewhat addressed). The matrix addresses changes in an individual as well as a systems level, against an axis that weighs the complexity of the solution.

I feel the best solution is that of reuse. From the matrix, you can see that the reuse system is thoroughly spread throughout the matrix, from simple to complex, between the individual and the system. I feel this provides a great platform to implement such a solution, possibly leveraging it through incremental changes (that is, from a simple individual level to a complex system integration).

Survey feedback

So I got the responses from the on-line survey – a total of 88 responses – and organized it in an affinity diagram. I translated that to an illustrator graph.

Reusable take-out and FDA regulations

Why is it okay for coffeeshops to allow customers to bring in their own take-out containers for drinks but not for food?

I looked through the FDA regulations and found these sections that address it.

What’s out there Research

A friend forwarded me this article. It’s what we all know, but puts it simply and in an organized manner: How green is your takeaway container?

Here’s the system I want to work with, and make it work. People do it already, I just have to mainstream it: Reusing your containers at restaurants

And here is a forum of what people think of bringing your own take-home container.

On that note, here’s the FDA Food Code I’ll have to work with/around (changes from state to state, but this has the gist, I believe).

I am getting great feedback from my survey. I’ll be synthesizing all this information this weekend.

I met with the general manager of the food provider here at SCAD and will be meeting with the SCAD dining hall sustainability champion tomorrow.

Behavior Change

I made up my mind… that I would never try to reform man–that’s much too difficult. What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions.
- Buckminster Fuller

With that said, here’s Dan Lockton’s developed toolkit for Design for Behavior Change.