How Might We Address the lack of fresh, healthy Food in Urban Food Deserts?

Challenge

An estimated 23.5 million Americans live in food deserts—urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, affordable, and nutritious foods. Forced to rely on fast food restaurants or corner convenience stores, residents of food deserts eat nutritionally deficient diets that contribute to higher rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and strokes.

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Strategy

Our team conducted field research in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunter’s Point—the 6th worst food desert in the nation. Through street intercepts, in-context immersion, and shadowing users on their grocery-shopping trips, we constructed personas to model customer journeys. Insights drawn from this needsfinding informed the design solution.

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Solution

UrbanBARN is a network of vending machines that offer low-income residents of urban food deserts convenient access to affordable, fresh, whole foods. The solution piggybacks on users’ existing habit of shopping at corner stores and leverages these locations to multiply and distribute access points in food desert neighborhoods.

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