Reinvigorating the Cooking Experience

Modern-age cooking trends have revolutionized the way that we perceive and interact with food. From kitchen robots that prepare meals in restaurants to popular social media accounts that show entire recipes in 2-minute videos, our interactions with food are becoming more digitized. In keeping with the times, typical grocery stores stock thousands of items, online recipe databases have exploded with options, and dietary restrictions get exponentially more complex and nuanced. Navigating this space as a young adult (mid-20's to mid-30's) is daunting and often leaves people feeling overwhelmed by the wealth of information and unable to make the best decisions. Thus, we find that people settle for what works and fall into archetypal eating behaviors to minimize their decision fatigue.

A combined global team from the Paris-Est d.school and Stanford University is working with Nestle to determine how to re-invent the food experience for young adults and provide people in dietary transition periods with appropriate and well-suited options. Popular French Nestle brands - Maggi, Herta, and Nestle Desserts - have challenged us to not only reinvent a range of culinary aids to help people better understand their products in the kitchen, but also to find the next big trends in the food experience.