“I don’t wanna cook!”

This project mainly focuses on international students and how they handle their daily meals. This idea came about because I found that international students, especially those living in Hong Kong, are facing more or less the following problems with their diets: (a) want to make their own convenient dishes fast and easily, (b) need the inspiration to cook/don’t know what to eat, (c) want to communicate with others/share recipes, (d) not too interested in cooking, just looking for convenience and speed, (e) want to eat hometown food.

At first, I paid more attention to the first three needs mentioned above and wanted to design a website that can inspire them in food choices, teach them how to make nutritional food fast and easily, and provide a platform for them to share and communicate with each other. However, I found that this was not a sustainable business model. It was difficult for the website to earn money from this service which already has a great number of competitors in the market. In the other words, the pain point I target was not painful enough to push the customers to pay for it.

Fortunately, a detail during the interview inspired me. The interviewee Jessica said that she and also her roommates would use cooperative transport to buy prepackaged hometown-styled food from mainland China. Because they, from Chong Qing, miss their hometown food very much but Hong Kong rarely has Chongqing-style cuisine, and even if they have, the prices are usually very expensive. Therefore, they chose to buy from mainland China, and then shipped them to Hong Kong. It takes a long time and asks for an extra cost, which can influence customer purchase experience. There’s room for me to improve the user experience in buying home-styled food and combing their needs with prepackaged food sellers.

Then, I tried to interview prepackaged food sellers from Taobao and figured out whether it was possible to make it. Also, I conducted basic data scrapping on recipes with regional characteristics – I want to use the provision of easy home-styled recipes as a “hook” to attack customers (may also accomplish the (a)-(c) needs). This “hook” will, later on, drive the traffic to the webpage showing prepackaged food, which provides an alternative for students who do not want/have no time to cook hometown food.

An overview of the prospect of this project can be found here.