SMART goals: the strategic goal(s) of the app.
Essentially, the goal of this app is to simplify the meal planning, grocery shopping, and preparation process for people who have allergies or are just wanting to make healthy choices with their diets. The app would allow users to input information about their food allergies/sensitivities/foods they want to avoid, as well as the dietary needs of their family, and where they want to grocery shop. It would allow them to pick out recipes/ meal plans and generate a grocery shopping list for those meals. The list would then be sent to their desired grocery store. The user would be able to pay for the groceries through the app and pick them up, already bagged, at the grocery store.
Specific: To simplify shopping for consumers that have dietary restrictions and/or want to eat healthily.
Measurable: The measurement of success is based on the amount of downloads to the target audience during the six month time frame.
Attainable: The number of recurring users of the application
Realistic: By looking at data and numbers and how many users downloaded the app and how many users came back, a goal for returning users will be set.
Time-Bound : The goal is to deliver a powerful, iconic, visual brand app to people between the age of 20-45 in 6 months.
USER PROFILE
WHO: Sarah is a busy 28-year-old mother of two who lives in Grandview, MO. She works part-time as a receptionist and is the primary caregiver of her children, grocery shopper, and meal prepper in her home. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family, hiking and going on dates with her man.
WHAT: Sarah’s husband and oldest son have a number of food allergies (gluten, dairy, tree nuts). She is also trying to change her diet to improve her health and overall well being. While Sarah and her husband both work hard to provide for their family, there is not a lot of wiggle room in their bank accounts for frivolous spending.
- Dealing with family food allergies
- Eating healthy
- Meal prepping to save time
- Shopping on a budget while considering the food allergies and healthy eating
- Managing time while grocery shopping, cooking & meal prepping
WHY: Because of all of the food allergies in her home, she finds it difficult to track down recipes and create meal plans that meet the needs of her family while also staying in budget. She constantly finds herself stuck in the grocery store, frantically reading labels, and trying to find alternative ingredient options for neat recipes that she saw on Pinterest. This process is time-consuming and disheartening as most of her attempts to substitute allergens for other ingredients tend to result in disappointing meals. Sarah just wants to be able to eat delicious, healthy food that meets the needs of her family without taking up an absurd amount of time or costing her an arm and leg.
WHEN: 2020 – health app users are more health-conscious than ever, and would be well-served by an app that is able to limit time spent in the grocery store while also maximizing the number of enjoyable meals that meet user dietary needs and preferences.
WHERE: Community of Grandview, MO. Within the city limits of Grandview, there are a few small market stores and one large grocery store, a Price Chopper. There isn’t a major health food or alternative food store such as Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s close by. There is one local farmers’ market that operates 4 months out of the year. The next closest locations would be to travel to Lee’s Summit or Belton, which are about 5-10 miles east and south of Grandview.
- The main location or setting of this problem is the home of Sarah. However, if Sarah and her family face this problem, we could ask how many other mothers or caregivers face this same problem.
- Could be considered a food desert for the radius of the area and population of the people in the city.
The other audience that we would be attempting to reach would be anyone with food allergies/anyone who wants to eat more healthily.
What are the competitors out there?
Paprika – Paprika Recipe Manager is an app that helps you organize your recipes, make meal plans and create grocery lists. Their built-in browser can allow you to save recipes from anywhere on the web. They have many features, for example, seamless cloud sync where you can manage your recipes on your computer, tablet, etc., and then take your phone with you to the grocery store. Paprika also provides web importing where you can look up any recipe on the web with a tap of a button and download that recipe and it will be saved into Paprika. One major feature they have is the interactive recipes. You can cross off ingredients when you’re done with them and tap to highlight the current direction step. This feature keeps your screen on when opening a recipe so you don’t have to worry about your screen turning off, you can add bold, italics, links and photos to recipes text and add high-resolution images to recipes and they will be stored in your cloud synced account. Paprika also automatically scales ingredients to your desired serving size and can convert ingredients between metric and imperial units. The app currently does cost and does vary on whether you are downloading through a mobile device or a computer. There was a Paprika 3 free trial for Andriod users in 2019, but only allowed to save 50 recipes and cloud sync is unavailable. As of now Paprika has no promotional activities going on right now.
FoodPrint – Nutrition Tracker (Nutrino Health Ltd) is a health and fitness meal logging app that allows users to track meals, nutrient intake, lifestyle activities (sleep, workouts) and medical information (blood glucose, insulin, and medications). It also offers device syncing for personal health devices like Fitbit/Apple Watch/Garmin Watch for direct activity tracking updates. Originally introduced as Nutrino, the app allows users to take pictures of their food and manually enter nutrition information, as well as lifestyle and health data, and learns what and how much the user likes to eat. Once some ‘learning’ has taken place, the app is able to suggest frequently logged items. The app also uses GPS location services to suggest nearby restaurants and markets that are likely to offer foods that fit the user’s preferred meal choices. Originally marketed to diabetic patients, the app’s target audience has recently expanded to all health-minded individuals with a retained special focus on diabetics. The app is free with no in-app purchases or in-app advertisements at the moment; however, it does have partnerships with several glucose monitor makers. There are no current promotional activities happening surrounding FoodPrint since its name change, but the social media accounts for the app when it was Nutrino are still up.
Spoonacular – A food management app that has a combined meal planner/food tracker app, Spoonacular claims to combine “dining out, eating store-bought food, and cooking at home to help you find and organize the restaurants, products, and recipes that fit your diet and can help you reach your nutrition goals.” The meal planner can be synced with a calendar and shared. Users can enter food preferences including item-based intolerances, measurement preferences (metric/imperial) and mealtime preferences. They can then search individual food items, saved recipes and manually enter recipes, and generate recipe boxes and meal plans. Once a meal plan has been generated, users can also generate shopping lists based on the saved information about recipes and items in their meal plan. The app is free, with a ‘donation box’ link on the desktop site. However, the API powering the app is available to license at 4 tiers of use, from $29/month and up. Promotional activities on social media are mostly limited to recipes of the day for app users.
What can you do better than the competitors?
This app isn’t just for groceries or for meal prep. It gives you recipe suggestions that match your specific needs, show you exactly what you need to make your meals and allows you to purchase your groceries. It will help users save time and money while also assisting them in eating healthily and giving them great allergy-friendly recipes.
