Designing Sustainable Food Systems for The Future Workers

System Design
Design Research
Food Design

Sodexo is the largest food service and facility management company. Founded in France and has expanded to the whole world from Europe to Asia, mainly focusing on the B2B sector.

Sodexo and the Royal College of Art are collaborating to hold a competition called Food and Algorithms, which aligns with Sodexo's vision for providing sustainable food service by adopting emerging technology.

I formed a group of students from Innovation Design Engineering and Design Future programs at RCA to come up with an innovative solution.

The team won first place in the design competition.

Defining the Intention

Sodexo serves a vast range of customer types, from office workers to hospitality, events, healthcare, and more. Primarily operating in the B2B sector, Sodexo has been running behind the scenes, managing major food infrastructure across multiple regions. The brief was quite broad and allowed us creative freedom, which became our first challenge - defining our intention to establish a clear direction and scope of work.

We initially mapped out the end-to-end food service process from farm to production to serving to disposal to address the issues and areas of opportunity.

We narrowed our focus to office workers because we thought the main problem of food waste was caused by the serving portion. So if we could serve the right portion, it could reduce food waste.

But then we asked ourselves: what’s in it for the customer if the system decides their food portions for them? We come up with the idea of matching the nutrient needs to increase the health of the individual.

“Focusing on portioning by matching the individual needs for nutrients, we aim to reduce the food waste while increasing productivity for the workers.”

We discovered that simply providing nutritious food in proper portions wasn't enough to drive user engagement; our current concept lacked a human-centred experience. Through research, we identified that workplace behaviour, particularly during busy periods, creates time constraints that force users to consume meals quickly or skip them entirely. This leads to reliance on snacks that, while healthy, aren't genuinely enjoyable to eat.

We aim to design a food system that provides quick, nutritious bites while meeting user needs and enhancing their eating experience

By providing personalised healthy food in 3 options based on the time to consume it, we try to break the perception that taking a break with food is time-consuming.

Designing the Micro-moment

The early sketch of our system concept, designed to force the worker to take a micro break between work and provide a food service inspired by an automat, where the food is served based on the individual's nutritional preferences and the duration of the break.

We mapped out the system that covers the technology and the food design

The first iteration of the app was designed as a scheduler and reminder tool, helping users take micro-breaks during work by connecting to their calendars. We called it One Space, as in one space for taking a break in a packed day,

We conducted a food experiment to understand what types of food would be perfect for different time frames for consuming: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes.

Final Outcomes

We designed a product-service system that we called Interlude, which enables users to set their daily break and meal preferences through the mobile app, paired with an automat-inspired food station that ensures their food is ready when their break time arrives.

This service works with cloud kitchen systems that can be built by companies like Sodexo to serve regional areas where food stations are placed in different offices. This makes it more economically viable for the client and Sodexo.

The end-user app evolved into a fun, form-based experience. Users could share their mood and preferences through quick prompts, and the system would respond with small, unexpected bites designed to surprise and delight.

Credit:

Interlude team:
Wigy Ramadhan (Innovation Design Engineering)

Yuki Abe (Innovation Design Engineering)

Hana Park (Design Future)

Matthew Lee (Innovation Design Engineering)