The Food Purveyor

Restaurants are the most common business in existence, and one of the oldest. Yet, there is a highly manual are tedious task that still takes place every day after the business closes. The restaurant manager will go through the shelves in the back, and tally the ingredients to see what they’re running low on, so that they order it the next day. This process can take hours. Early the next morning, the manager will call or fax their orders to one of many food purveyors to place their order. Prices for these items change daily, as are the ways they are packaged and sold. How has something that is done so frequently by so many businesses remained so manual?

My Role

I was hired by two hopeful first-time Entrepreneurs to help them think through this problem. My role was Researcher, Product Designer, but also as a consultant on how to approach this initiative. My contract with them ran for 2 months, and overlapped with the offshore development team. Along with weekly meetings in restaurants and exploring “back of the house”, we built prototypes and tested in the wild.

Ergonomic studies