Design for reducing the food waste of the TUDelft banquet service

Abstract

In the past decade, food waste has accepted intensive attention from society. It is increasingly acknowledged that approximately one-quarter of the food for human consumption is wasted throughout the food supply chain (Papargyropoulou , 2014). At the Delft University of Technology, It organizes a vast meeting every day in different facilities. The banquet service with the company of Cirfood would be the food supplier to provide the lunch for the guests during the meeting. Typically, the orderer needs to book the food from the “Banque” website, the official and only platform that merely offers the food for the Delft University of Technology.
In contrast, it must go through a long journey from booking the food to disposing of the food with conference organizers, the secretariat who is also the orderer, and the Cirfood caterer in a different stage. The project figures out the workflow of the banquet service and understands the problems of different stakeholders that meet during the process that cause food waste. The design solution achieved the vision: I envision a seamless banquet service aiming to help the organizers, orderers and audience collaborate to reduce food waste. The project ends with the holistic banquet service concept, which integrates with the website, APP, and packages to apply numerous design interventions for multiple stakeholders to meet their value towards collaborating to reduce food waste. In addition, validation has proven that the new service concept could achieve the goal of the design vision.