Forestwise wanted a suitable way to serve their Arenga Rainforest Sugar in Dutch cafés. This brown sugar comes from Indonesia and is a tasty, healthy and sustainable alternative to regular sugar. It is wild-harvested from the Arenga palm tree, which grows naturally inside the jungle. The Arenga sugar provides the local farmers with an income from their existing forests and motivates them to halt deforestation and protect biodiversity. This background story should be communicated to end-consumers.

The first analysis phase consists of research about the sugar’s source, the context of use, and the sugar’s characteristics. Applying the Material Driven Design method stimulates to not take the granulated, brown Arenga sugar as given, but play with texture, shape and process to find a more suitable way to serve it.

Synthesizing the insights into a Material Experience Vision and Design Criteria leads to a variety of ideas, categorised into 9 design directions. From those, 3 concepts are worked out. The stencil shaker concept makes use of the dark colour of the sugar and puts a surprise illustration, depicting the rainforest’s biodiversity, on the milk foam of the café guest’s drink. The rainforest globe concept is a decorative, round sugar pot from glass, depicting the eco-system of the Arenga tree and the rainforest. The selected concept of the sugar block grater lets the user transform traditional, hard sugar blocks into flakes.

A more specific vision is defined to develop this concept. The metaphor of a opening flower bud describes the desired user experience. The sugar should be perceived as natural and special. It is furthermore desired to let the café guests explore the background story of the sugar and get actively involved in it, feeling curiosity, pleasant surprise and virtuousness.

The final design proposal is a grater made out of bamboo, which is placed on the café’s tables. It is filled with cylindrical sugar blocks with chocolate-like texture. The café guest can grate sugar flakes by rotating the base of the grater. A mechanism turns and pushes the sugar blocks against a knife with two blades, shaving off a layered spiral of flakes.

The sugar comes out at the top of the grater in the shape of a flower. The user can observe the sugar “growing” inside an illustration of the rainforest, which is engraved in the bamboo around. This lets the user experience how the sugar naturally grows inside the biodiverse rainforest in Indonesia, contrary to being cultivated in monoculture plantations. The background story of the sugar is illustrated with engravings on the outside of the greater, showing how the sugar is wild-harvested and processed. The café guests become part of the process by grating their own sugar flakes to sweeten their drinks. This drives a sustainable system of rainforest and local farmers. The sugar is presented as special and natural, in an attractive and novel way.

The concept is tested with a working prototype and evaluated by users and cafés.