In November 2016 I joined More Than Carrots, we collaborated with branding partners, tech businesses and developers to enable people to allow them to choose out of home dining experiences with more vegetables, more enjoyment, more convenience and less meat
A Meat Reducer journey
Ambition
Animal Agriculture accounts for around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a leading contributor to the negative effects of climate change and shares a footprint equivalent to the entirety of the Global Transportation Sector. The bright side is there is just one barrier to the immediate global adoption of a primarily plant-based diet and that is our behaviour. The current food system already holds enough resources to feed our planet fairly.
With this in mind, More Than Carrots knew that they had to determine and challenge the factors that encourage a resistance to vegetarian and vegan eating. Founder, Annette Burgard had the lived experience of trying to change her diet to one that was more planet friendly. Users like her struggled finding ‘less meat’ options in the places they were used to looking. They had to read to the bottom of the menu, walk to a different aisle of the supermarket, turn down dinner plans with friends and eat lots of mushroom risotto (this last one is a joke…sort of).
The existing resources were aimed at vegans and vegetarians and as a consequence remained widely unknown among meat-eaters. However, no one had yet tried a ‘flexible’ approach, designed to meet users through the channels they were already using; this we believed could unlock the ultimate solution.
Wireframing and logic mapping
Sprint planning
What we did
More Than Carrots worked closely with meat-reducing diners to build a backlog of comprehensive user stories [I need…, so that…, because…]. These stories defined a scope for the digital product and service outcomes we developed. Each outcome was built upon a range of hypotheses that we tested and subsequently assessed against. From our extensive user research and organisation capability we identified a meaningful solution needed to be:
- easily scalable
- available to all
- agnostic of dietary motivation
- and improve the enjoyment of vegetarian food
In order to determine this criteria we tested a range of push and pull prototypes with users. These ranged from specialist dining experiences, to educational workshops, online tools and partnership integrations with leading restaurant food sales and booking channels.
Our work was diner-led and we became a guide to find, rate and rank restaurants based on their vegetarian offering. Using readily available restaurant data, More Than Carrots has defined key metrics that determine a users ‘vegetarian’ experience at any restaurant.
A promotional graphic for the App store
The results
The rating mechanism has empowered many diners to choose restaurants based on their vegetarian offering, particularly for those looking to make group bookings.
Some of London’s leading restaurants have also requested steps they can take to improve their vegetarian offering and are more interested in the diner experience than ever before.
Most importantly for More Than Carrots, a mechanism has been developed that can be released via open API to any third party platform. This provides the opportunity to partner with organisations looking to improve their filtering, sorting and user experience when a diner selects vegetarian, vegan or climate friendly.