Improving the Grocery Shopping Experience

Young urban professionals in Germany are always on the move --- catching the train for the morning commute, working from 9AM to 7PM, riding the train home, exercising or hanging out with friends, then possibly squeezing in a grocery shopping trip and cooking dinner for that night. Although they would like to cook more often, at the end of the day, they often feel too tired to even think about what they`ll make for dinner that night. The entire cooking process, from the initial planning phase to cleaning dishes, can seem like an incredibly time-consuming ordeal. When they do have time to cook a meal, they tend to rotate through the limited number of recipes they know and become bored with the lack of variety or feel that there is too large of a time investment in learning new or more advanced recipes.

Our team has developed MarketSphere, a mobile application and grocery pick-up service that enables these young professionals to prepare home-cooked meals without consuming too much of their already limited time.

MarketSphere includes an online system that allows our customer to browse new, exciting recipes while on his commute home. These recipes are organized by cooking skill level, and our user can learn something new with every meal. Our user starts as a novice in the kitchen, and by cooking with our app, he can practice cooking techniques and gain knowledge of how to use ingredients, all of which is provided in each recipe. Our system also structures this learning process to keep users motivated— one must complete a certain number of recipes in each level before moving on to more advanced levels. By working through these recipes and levels, our users will gain knowledge and confidence in the kitchen to try new recipes and craft their own.

Once our customer has chosen a meal to cook, he can either accept the default brands for each ingredient in the recipe, or he can virtually walk through his local grocery store, customizing his meal. This allows the customer to choose ingredients that may be organic, gluten-free, etc. and to personalize the recipe and make it his own. He can additionally purchase common items like milk or bread to be packed with his kit to avoid checkout lines in the store. Having a virtual store based on images from actual stores celebrates the store’s individuality and in-store aesthetics and allows time-pressed customers to still shop at their familiar, local store.
When ordering on the app, our customer can choose a convenient location where he can pick up his package. Our customer can pass by the food pick-up station where his customized package is locked within a refrigerated space. This package has all of the components necessary to make the meal he ordered with ingredients already measured and prepared, cutting out the tedious steps of the cooking process. Having prepared ingredients in the package reduces the daily mental overhead that our customer feels when having to plan and shop for his dinner and increases his leisure time in the evenings.