FoodFluence
Know Your Impact
Do you know the impact of your food choices?
Whether you know it or not, every food you eat has its own unique impact on the environment.
Foodfluence takes users on a journey that helps people understand how their choices influence deforestation, groundwater contamination, water use, and other environmental issues.
Our tool helps demystify your impact and provides climate-friendly alternatives that you can incorporate into your weekly grocery shopping trip to continue enjoying the foods you love.
User Experience
Food Story
From the opening screen, users will select a food from a list of options. After selecting a food, a new screen will open with information about that food. This section provides general information about the food: its popularity, ingredients, and other fun facts.
What is the Impact?
After learning about the food selected, users will continue the food story and learn about various environmental impacts that are associated with the food. This may include the amount of water it takes to produce the product or how the food impacts biodiversity in ecosystems.
Specific example
After learning about the general impact of the food, users will dive deeper into a direct impact the food has had on a specific ecosystem, species, or community. This leaves users with a clear and meaningful understanding of the impact of the food.
Call to Action
After learning about the selected food and its impact, users will have a clear call to action based on the food they selected. This may include giving users suggestions about specific actions they can take to lessen their impact, showing less impactful alternative products, as well as similar products to avoid.
Why Use FoodFluence
Food Awareness
Who should use FoodFluence?
Anyone and everyone!
FoodFluence is meant to be a source of information for anyone who is curious about the environmental impact of food. Our goal is for a user to leave our web application with enough information to make a change during their next grocery shopping trip.
It is not always clear what it means to buy strawberries instead of raspberries, or soy milk instead of almond milk. We hope to demystify these questions with FoodFluence and empower users to learn more about the impact of their food choices.
Research
We found that there is a large number of people who do not know the environmental impact of the food they eat.
Many of our users did not know how to lessen their environmental impact without making changes to their dietary choices.
For our users, many assumed the only way they could lessen their impact was to change to a vegetarian or vegan diet.
For many of our users, completely changing their diet was unappealing or unsustainable.
For some of our users, changing to a vegetarian or vegan diet would be inconvenient or financially difficult.
FoodFluence wanted to find a meaningful way for users to feel empowered to change their diet instead of discouraged.
FoodFluence decided to focus on a per food/product basis because our users said they felt more empowered to modify specific food choices as opposed to completely changing their diets.
Additionally, because FoodFluence shows alternative products users can buy, users felt like they could make changes right away since it did not require additional research.
Our Team
We are all students in the Informatics program at the University of Washington.
Michelle is a 5th year senior at the University of Washington. For this project, Michelle was the lead UX designer.
Casey is a 3rd year senior at the University of Washington. For this project, Casey was a developer and researcher.
Nick is a 5th year senior at the University of Washington. For this project, Nick was the lead developer.
Peyton is a 5th year senior at the University of Washington. For this project, Peyton was the lead researcher.
Contact Us
If you're interested in learning more about our project, please email Casey at caseylum@uw.edu. We're interested in getting in contact with environmental and/or food organizations.