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Creating an App to Address Food Sustainability in Rural Areas

Intimidated at how to shop consciously, sustainably, and still work with your schedule? Meet Replenish, a sustainable grocery delivery and collection community in Rural Virginia.

Yeah, we get that fear. Replenish provides you fresh, locally-sourced groceries and does the leg work in making sure your food/packaging waste goes to the write places.

Sounds to good to be true? Replenish is the brain child of Rachael Quan, Karina Springer, and Sharon Chen to make sustainable shopping easier, more accessible, and a collaborative process. So get out there, and Replenish



Discovering target demographics through Interviews and Personas

To understand more about food insecurity specifically in the New River Valley (NRV), the team interviewed experts in the field who were local to the NRV. From these interviews, we were able to get some key takeaways:

  • Bins should have better instructions such as text and visuals to help people properly recycle

  • It is a myth that all items should be cleaned out before recycling. It is more to reduce trash and pileup, which leads to bugs and rodents that hinders the process of recycling.

  • A big issue with packaging is you only want to use as much as you need when trying too be sustainable.

  • Bamboo is really sustainable because it is fast growing and easy to get, thus better than wood. It’s really strong and good at reinforcing things. Algae based plastics are very nice for sustainability, although it is more of a new thing that is being developed

  • Industrial compostable means someone must collect and send it to a compost facility with specific conditions (ex. Correct temp, time). However, there are only 2 in the state of Virginia.

  • There are multiple views in which one can consider sustainability - economic and societal. Packaging engineers must consider these factors and deal with regulations and incentives.

From this, we created journey maps and personas that would help us acurately reflect the process.
So, 


Alice
Age: 19 years old
Values: freshman in college studying environmental science
Interests: plants, matcha, hanging out with friends
Lifestyle: No car, lives on campus, likes her roommate
Goals: To get groceries easier without having to drive, help the environment to save the turtles


Lenny
Age: 73 years old
Values: cares about the world, sweet old man trying to do his best on the time he has, only does things in life that makes him happy
Interests: Movies, history, coffee shops
Lifestyle: Joe is a retired engineer who is enjoying his retirement in a sleepy college town. The youths keeps him alive!
Goals: To leave the world in a better place than where he came

Kayla
Age: 21 years old  
Values: to be more knowledgeable
Interests: cooking, painting, enjoying time outside with her friends
Lifestyle: busy college student, loves to wind down with a good home-cooked dinner at night
Goals: reducing environmental impact while still maintaining hobbies, raise awareness about the topic for other people

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