Food Genius is Big Data for the food industry. Food Genius Reports, its online food-trends dashboard, uses a complex algorithm to aggregate 100,000+ restaurant menus, 22 million+ menu items, and 14,000 different ingredients from multiple restaurant databases to classify consumers’ dining-out behaviors. The game-changing data service allows food industry professionals (such as chefs, restaurant owners, food product developers, and food industry consultants) to uncover real-time insights about trending ingredients, dishes, preparation methods, and sensory terms. This enabling them to make better, more informed business decisions.

The food industry lacks quality data on restaurants and consumer dining-out behavior. Consumers spend more than $600 billion each year dining out and more than $500 billion each year in grocery stores. Loyalty cards, scanner data, and large consumer panels provide deep insight into consumer behavior in grocery stores, but there is virtually no parallel data on their behavior in restaurants. Existing restaurant data reports rely on 40-year old market research techniques that don’t have the scale of modern web technologies. They lack granularity and can’t be predictive. By tracking 22 million restaurant menu items and all the corresponding components that go into each dish, Food Genius Reports leverages analytic techniques to generate high quality and incredibly granular data for an array of commercial and consumer uses. This 4-week user interface design sprint took place in preparation for the launch of Food Genius Reports. Our challenge was to create an engaging, accessible dashboard that presented instant data and trend analysis in a format other than the typical, information-dense spreadsheet.

Before Food Genius became our design firm’s first Startup-in-Residence, it was a technology-focused product-development company with a consumer-facing, food-discovery mobile app. The experience working with our venturing team encouraged Food Genius to focus on the company’s expertise and true value to the industry and reposition its core offer from app developer to API and data provider—a “pivot” in venturing terms. During its 14-week residency, Food Genius co-located in our studio and began building out its new platform. Our designers collaborated on experimental, deep-dive design sessions with the startup, covering such topics as qualitative research methods, designing with data, business and technological development strategies, and product road mapping.

After interviewing brand managers, product researchers, chefs, and other food experts, Food Genius and our design team soon realized that Food Genius Reports couldn’t simply deliver raw data tables to the food industry. To elicit feedback on their information needs, food industry professionals were shown non-food data visualizations and were given paper, markers, tape, and scissors to create their ideal Reports dashboard. The design team went through two functional prototypes in a few weeks using a combination of Python, D3, and JavaScript. Once the team identified the core interaction of the app—the “list-of-terms” approach – functional prototypes were abandoned and mock-ups of various fidelities began to be tested. After another 5 or 6 rounds of edits and feedback, the team settled on the existing design. One major insight gleaned from the research was that food industry professionals are using Food Genius Reports for many different reasons and, therefore, they require different entry points into the data. Sometimes the target group is set, sometimes a main ingredient is set, and sometimes a category like “high-end snack” is set. Depending on the user’s entry point, the work flow is a bit different. The main work flow enables building a “dish” via a simple, drag-and-drop interaction. The system then recalculates to indicate which are the most commonly paired ingredients with the current dish the user has put together.

The final dashboard design is a fairly open system that allows the user to manipulate the data on his or her own terms. The tool provides manufacturers, distributors, operators, and CPG brands with actionable insights, granular data, and emerging restaurant trends. For the food industry, the data Food Genius Reports supplies is the perfect platform for product development, creating new marketing strategies, and prototyping potential concepts. In an article for Fast Co. Design, Mark Wilson describes Food Genius Reports as “a powerful piece of enterprise software that pre-chews Big Data for the restaurant industry. …I was impressed by the dead-simple UI. Everything is conveyed through a single list. [Y]ou start by selecting a broad category—like meat—then you can ‘drill down’ to beef. The final design…despite how simplistic it looks, actually showcases the platform’s number-crunching power.” Our collaboration has had a transformative effect on Food Genius as a company, as well. “When we first met [the design team], we expected them to solve our design issues. What we learned during our residency, however, was how to become a customer-centered company and sustainably solve our business problems,” says Justin Massa, CEO of Food Genius. “The experience was life-changing.”

Food Genius’ data covers more than 25 different cultural regions of cuisine, ranging from African to Thai to Southwestern US.

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