Colloquia

Summary

Present-day a variety of initiatives try to reduce the negative impact caused by humans. The food supply chain is of special interest since it is essential to provide the world population with nutrition every day. Therefore, the negative impact of food supply will keep applying pressure on human society. This is constituted by the environmental impact of production, transport, food waste, and packaging waste. In specific for reducing the negative impact of food packaging waste, bulk food dispensers seem to provide a promising alternative. Closely observing these developments, Food Dispense identified a window of opportunity for the design of an innovative and sustainable food dispenser for the retail market in the Netherlands.

Food Dispense is a self-employed company that sells food dispensers, with a focus on the market segment of bulk- and bio stores. Their vision is to contribute to a healthy world and healthy people, by engaging in healthy food production and creating healthy environments with a focus on food retail. To validate and transparently communicate about the identified opportunity, research is required. The design question of this research is:

“How can a new bulk food dispenser product positively contribute to the development of food retailers towards sustainable food retail?”

Hypothetically, defining a vision for sustainable food chains, should lead to characteristics for packaging options that have the potential to contribute. The scope was narrowed down to the retail sector, which is the main application sector for food dispensers. However, discovering a lack of vision for sustainable food chains, directed the research to investigate the basic principles that constitute the concept of sustainability. Starting at the highest level of abstraction (figure), research on each level has been conducted following a top down approach to validate the potential of food dispensers. Consequently, it is determined that although food dispenser development is novel, it does have the potential to contribute to one of the options for a reuse system application for retail.

However, the potential also has its limitations that prevent the introduction of food dispensers in food retail. These limitations, or barriers, are categorized and their progress is investigated. As a result, a systems solution for handling the food hygiene was determined as the most underdeveloped. Through an open design iteration, solutions were found that can serve as options for future development. To validate these solutions a design method is composed and used to increase the number of possible design solutions.