Kraft Pods: Designing User Experience from start to finish

The Challenge

KraftHeinz approached us with a broad challenge: redesign a consumer packaged food in a way that helps consumers minimize waste in frozen meals and savory foods. With only the board category frozen food and the mission of waste reduction in mind, we began talking to users and exploring the area.

Our Insight

As we talked to people, and in particular younger people, we found that they rarely ate frozen meals. Instead the often opted to meal prep, or cook a large servings of food at once so that they could individually package it and eat it over the course of about a week. People were choose meal prep because they enjoyed active cook time, creating their own balanced meals, and having the flexibility pull in foods they already had at their home. However, even though people like having some active cook time, meal prep often took longer than they would've liked. It was also hard for people to manage the quantities of food that they bought for meal prep without some of it going to waste, and the meals could become very monotonous

Our key insight was that frozen food could be easily used to mitigate the weakness in the current meal prep experiences while keeping all of meal prep's strengths, all while reducing food waste and using sustainable packaging.

Kraft Pods

Kraft Pods are a system of pre-portioned frozen foods that can stand alone or be used with fresh ingredients to reduce food waste throughout the home cooking and meal prep processes.

Planning

We found the users plan their meal prep one of two ways. The first way is meal focused. Users decided what meal they wanted to eat and then purchased the ingredients for it. The second way was ingredients focused. The user would check their home to see what ingredients that they had on hand, and then figured out what meals could be made using those ingredients. We found that ingredient focused approach is one way that users manage food waste. One user described adding some fresh produce she had on hand to her meal prep so that she could eat the produce before it went bad. In order to maintain this flexibility Kraft Pods were designed to be modular so that they could be made into a pre-determined recipe listed on the package or incorporated into whatever recipe that the user needed to use the ingredients on hand. The modularity also gives users a clear picture of the amount of carbs, vegetables, and protein going into their meals, allowing them to easily plan meals to fit their nutritional needs.

Purchase

When we walked down frozen food aisles, we found that they were dominated by cardboard boxes with brightly colored print and pictures. We saw the similarity of much of the other packaging as an opportunity to create a packaging that really stood out to users as they walked down the frozen food aisle. When we tested potential shapes pod shapes, we found people reacted really postively to spheres. We wanted to design packaging that brought that emphasized the spherical pod, and followed its circular shape. We settled on a cardboard cylinder with a clear recyclable plastic cap to emphasize the pod and continue the circular theme throughout the packaging. We opted for more minimal labeling to emphasize the natural and recyclable nature of the cardboard and further

Cooking

When we talked to users, we were surprised to find that users didn’t want to cook their food as fast as possible. Instead, we found that users actually enjoyed some cooking time. One user described 20-30 minutes of cooking time as chance to interact with her food, listen to music and take a break from the rest of her day. However, meal prep often takes significantly longer for users than 20-30 minutes, making it a chore instead of a nice break. We also observed that users found it challenging to manage the quantity food that they bought, often buying too much or too little. This was a particularly challenging when users wanted to try new recipes which often called for ingredients that users use infrequently. This forces users to either buy ingredients that will likely go bad, or avoid trying new recipes. Frozen foods, however, are good at decreasing cook time and managing portions, and we wanted to bring those strengths to the meal prep experience. By proportioning and cutting foods in advanced, Kraft Pods reduce cook time without eliminating it, make the preparation of new recipes, and allow users to get infrequently used ingredients in smaller quantities to reduce food waste.

Disposal

It was important be able to show the Pod both to intrigue potential users, and to help clarify what was in the package. Many other frozen meals show the meals using plastic windows built into the box. However, in most places these plastic windows need to be separated from the cardboard in most places to be recycled. We choose to use a recyclable plastic cap instead of a window because in the natural use of the product the cap would be removed from the cardboard, saving the user the extra time of needing to remove the plastic and confusion of not knowing if the packaging is recyclable.