Digital Sandwich
Overview
Digitising the sandwich supply chain to provide full visibility every product, ingredient and transaction from farm to fork.
My role
Service Designer
UX/UI designer
Workshop facilitator
Brand designer
Timeframe
Oct 2020 - Jan 2021
Aug 2021 - Nov 2021
Client
Innovate UK + Raynors Foods
The challenge
We know what products flow between businesses, but current solutions cannot trace ingredients back to their original source. To do this, we need to know what happens inside each business and track the movement and conversion of each item.
Why?
1. Consumer safety
Remember the Pret allergy incident, the horse meat scandals and listeria outbreaks?
Consumers are increasingly interested in the provenance of their goods, welfare across supply chains, sustainability and carbon reduction. Consumer health and safety is the most important factor in the food and drink industry.
2. Sustainability
There is a need for better sustainability across the UK Food & Drink industry, including packaging and plastics, transport and logistics. Inconsistencies in supply and demand, up and down the supply chain, also causes overproduction and increases food waste (costing £15bn per year).
3. Supply chain inefficiencies
The lack of transparency across the supply chain creates a lot of distrust, low security in data exchanges, and enables illegal behaviours, such as modern slave labour and illegal fish farming. Also within these companies processes are very manual, with disjointed systems, and mostly the use of pen, paper and excel.
Description
In order to trace ingredients to their origins, we need to know what happens inside and between business at each stage of the supply chain. Therefore, we digitised these processes and developed a national demonstrator using the production of a ham and cheese sandwich as a use case.
IoT - Records and delivers metadata of products (location / environment) in real-time
Blockchain - Provides immutable food traceability and secure financing solutions
AI - Provides analytics that optimise supply chain inventory to drive service level and reduce waste
The final platform will have potential for application in other sectors including fashion, pharmaceutical,
aerospace and automotive.
Stakeholders
The consortium consisted of 8 partners contributing to the project, each offering solutions for the different technology areas. For the purpose of the demo, we would use two suppliers (Wicks Manor & Piquant), one manufacturer (Raynor Foods).
Discovery
To ensure we’re building the right solutions to the right challenges, it was important to do a detailed discovery phase to understand the current state of the situation. The details of this phase are shown below:
Key insights
Below are the main paint points that were most common and consistent across both production processes for Raynor Foods and Wicks Manor.
I then mapped out the main challenges along the different stages of the process, numbering them based on the biggest challenges. I plotted these numbers along a detailed process flow, as well as capturing the areas that were impacted. This meant it was clear at a glance where the main pain point areas were for each factory.
Diagrams are shown below:
Concept
I created a high level process map of the ideal to-be solution. This included the different steps, where they take place in the factory, the technology involved, the data is being captured at each stage and who gets notified.
Ideation
We shared and discussed the concept with the consortium to capture where there may be gaps or unknowns. We ran a brainstorming workshop with the consortium (consisting of 30 people), to ideate around how we could approach these unknown areas. We formed ‘how might we’ questions and split the consortium into four groups based on their expertise in the areas the questions were targeting.
Each group ideated around 2 ‘how might we’s’, then voted and refined their ideas.
Each group ideated, shared, discussed their ideas, then voted on the best and most feasible solutions.
The voted idea was refined to further explain the impact, who it impacted, where it fits in the process and the limitations.
We repeated this process again using another ‘how might we’ question for each group. This meant we were able to discuss, refine and share a total of 8 finalised ideas across all groups.
Refine
Every step in this process flow is very complex, so we broke down the concept into smaller sections to allow us to explore each in more detail and refine the solution.
Our areas of focus are shown below:
Onboarding
The onboarding of entities, facilities, users, products, ingredients and waypoints (key locations).
Create an organisation
Register and sign in page.
Option to create or join an organisation
Enter organisation details, this user becomes the admin.
Onboarding members
Enter user details, roles and departments.
Set their permissions based on their role.
2. Process planner
We introduced the planner to set up the processes in the system, so staff can see the necessary steps and critical checks at each step. They can schedule and track every ingredient and its journey.
Planner
Users can map the process flow of each ingredient of every product.
This is a flexible tool to design the flow, set-up inspection events and waypoint locations, enabling better management of items.
The planner is the one source of truth of how each ingredient should move through the factory, and provides the ability to trace back the various identities and ingredients of the final products.
It also provides information of:
Who (people handling and inspecting the product)
When (date and time of event)
Where (location of event and where the product is going next)
Why (context, including the step taking place (e.g. receiving), supplier/ receiving party information, state of the products (e.g. active/ damaged), links to transaction documents (e.g. a purchase order) and IoT metadata)
3. Recipe definition
Supply chains are complex.
A ham and cheese sandwich is made of white bread, ham, sunflower spread, and mature cheddar cheese. Every ingredient has their own ingredients, which then may each have their own suppliers and ingredients. The sandwich recipes also change very often for several reasons, so data accuracy and “freshness” is very important.
Recipe
A Recipe is set of instructions for preparing a particular dish, including a list of the ingredients required.
When onboarding a product (e.g. Ham and cheese sandwich) the user can link every ingredient and sub-ingredient, containing ingredient and supplier details.
4. Mobile app
An app to scan products and waypoints, perform inspections, capture discrepancies and raise issues.
4. End consumer
What will the end consumer see? What level of information do we want to share?
Limited edition sandwich
The end product will be a limited edition sandwich, with unique packaging and the ability for the consumer to scan a QR code and see the journey of their product and ingredients.
I mocked up how this end product might look.
I also explored the type of information the consumer could see once having scanned the QR code.
Learnings
Having a large number of members in a consortium means everyone needs to be aligned and have the same vision. There was a lot of misalignment about the solution, meaning simplifying and making complex concepts visual was crucial, as everyone could discuss around the same thing at the same level of understanding.
Understanding the world of sandwiches in extreme detail was vital to make this project work, this included the processes, products, people, roles, systems, daily activities, what happens when it goes wrong and what happens when it goes right. It taught me a lot about the asking the right questions and uncovering different angles to specific challenges.