goodfood by michal kwasieborski from poland

GoodFood Background:
Project is an answer for a typical problem of present-day high developed societies – wasting the food. According to the data presented by the UK website www.lovefoodhatewaste.com British society throws away 6,7 million tonnes of good food every year.
Wasting the food causes numerous undesirable effects like:increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, depletion of natural resources and hunger.
There are many initiatives across the world focused on education and preventing food wasting. They mostly exist in Internet and as educative campaigns. We present the household IT equipment product that supports the fight against food wasting.

Product description: GoodFood is an electronic, interactive kitchen book that helps planning food preparation, taking into consideration number of portions to be prepared and products that user already has at home.
It consists of two pieces:
1. Simple palmtop with touch screen, to put on the fridge (using 4 small neodymium magnets).
Palmtop size: 18cm*12cm*0,9cm.
Touch screen is the only navigating tool.
Simple shape with only one small hole for charging.
Palmtop can communicate with other IT devices via Bluetooth.
2.Kitchen scales in form of bowl with the scaling mechanism on the bottom. Scaling mechanism is an integral part of the bowl that is made of two plastic moulds jointed together with piece of silicon (in the place where it need to be elastic). Kitchen scales communicate with the palmtop via Bluetooth.
Both pieces are designed to be user friendly (even for persons with low computer literacy), easy to keep clean in the kitchen (by making it in as simple shape as possible) and attractive for purchaser.

How it works: GoodFood is a recipes database with developed searching engine. User can create an additional ad hoc database of the products he would like to use for preparing a meal – then GoodFood will search for a recipes relevant to the products that user choose (and additional searching criteria given by him).
GoodFood also adapt the recipes to the number of portions that user want to prepare, so it help to avoid food wasting.
GoodFood is a database that can be filtered with searching criteria choose by the user.
The most important and innovative one is the criteria of products (and the amount of it) to be used in preparing the meal. Thanks to that user can choose one or few product to be used and search the recipes that are made only with this products (in given amount) or recipes that contain this products (in given amount). It helps to find a way of using the good product that remain in the fridge.
Additional searching criteria (few examples):
preparation time (f.e. less than 30 minutes, 30 minutes – 1 hour, more than 1 hour, type of the meal (f.e. soup, dessert, main course, starter, salad, etc..., way of preparing (f.e. cooked, fried, baked, etc...), special criteria (f.e. diabetes, vegetarian, kosher, etc...)
GoodFood always ask as the first question – how many portions need to be prepared?. Than it adapt the recipes and gives the information of amount of products needed to prepare a concrete number of portions. It helps to plan the shopping in advance – user can check how much products will need.
When user is searching for a recipe that allow him to use products he already has – he gives also information about the amount of them (can use kitchen scales to check – f.e. user has a piece of cheese and can put it in the bowl, that will communicate with palmtop and sent to it the information about the weight of cheese). GoodFood is searching for a recipes that allow to prepare concrete number of portions with given amount of products (f.e. 4 portions of main dish, contains 450g of beef, 700g of fresh tomatoes and 400g of potatoes).

Possible further development: GoodFood can communicate via Bluetooth with PCs. It is possible to develop web community, where everybody can place his own recipes (in format that will allow to add this recipes to the global GoodFood database). In that way the number of available recipes will be still growing and become a worldwide kitchen book. Holders of the GoodFood can download new recipes. Website users also can use the same search engine on the webpage. Such place in Internet would be perfect for promoting good behaviours.
GoodFood can be also used as a portable kitchen book (f.e. when travelling and want to find way to prepare local food in another country).
It will be also possible to download another databases on a GoodFood, f.e. the database with information about food storage methods.

Why it is green design: 1.Support better food utilization: helps to find ways of using the products people already have at home, helps to plan shopping (gives info how much products are needed, support meals preparation by adapting the recipes to given amount of portions
2. Can developed to the web community of users, what makes easy the promotion of rational consumer behaviours.
3. Can be a platform of communication about ecology connected to the food issues.
4. It is very useful device, that can easily become popular because of its real usability.
5. Based on well known technical solutions and on simple databases and searching engines can be produced cheap (with no exacting R&D works) and also sold cheap - thanks to that become available to the general public.