In this day and age, when we can get virtually anything we want at a moment’s notice, why is it still so difficult to get the ingredients we need to make the dinner we want, right when we want it?

The Merchant and Muse is a new grocery service dedicated to answering this question. It is, most simply, a neighborhood market on wheels (i.e. a truck), carrying a curated set of high-quality, ever-evolving ingredients. The Merchant and Muse combines the quality and control of grocery shopping, with the spontaneity of ordering delivery—allowing for easy, impromptu cooking tonight.

The Merchant and Muse was developed as part of a 12-week Service Design Workshop at IIT’s Institute of Design. The challenge was open-ended and clear: design a new service that generates revenue and evolves with the user over time. To develop such a service, it was expected that we focus, not only on desirability (what’s great for users), or viability (what creates business value) or feasibility (what’s possible to implement), but hone our efforts at the intersection of all three.

Our team set our sights on designing a food service. After a first round of secondary research, we narrowed focus to explore how folks in dense urban areas—with busy work schedules and little time to food shop—buy ingredients to cook dinner at home. This led to more in-depth conversations with experts in food production and distribution, as well as primary research with our target foodie demographic. Through these conversations, we framed our project with the following challenge: how might we connect people to great quality ingredients, when and where they need, keep people in control, but still make it easy and inspirational?

“If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are.” - Tim Kreider, New York Times (June 30, 2012) --

“Busy!” “Crazy busy.” This has become the default response when asked how we’re doing. Whether or not people are actually busy isn’t really the point. We all feel busy. And this affects everything, including how, when and what we eat. A ton of services—new and old—try to make it easier, faster, and more convenient to get the food we want. But they assume some truths that fall short. Like grocery delivery is an easy answer (it’s not when you’re rarely home); or cooking needs to be dummy-proofed (where’s the fun in that?). For our “crazy busy” target demographic, our team believes that there are two things that really matter in a grocery service: spontaneity and control. Through our initial research phase, we saw how existing services fail because they either require planning and time, or they require giving up the control of touching, feeling and squeezing your own groceries. Our mission was to re-unite these two attributes under one service that ultimately makes it easier for people to cook dinner tonight.

Our 12-week project included continual research at different levels of fidelity. To begin, we conducted interviews with experts in food production and distribution—talking with growers and sellers to lay a business foundation for our service. We also held group interviews with members of our target audience, and tagged along as they grocery shopped. These conversations and observations allowed us to frame up the opportunity space, with both user and business goals in mind. At the same time, our team dove head first into the competitive landscape, trying any and all existing food services: from farmer’s markets, CSAs and grocery stores, to third-party shopping apps, meal-delivery kits, food-of-the-month clubs and meal assembly centers.

With a deep and varied understanding of the current offerings and opportunities, we generated ideas for new ways to connect people with ingredients—always with a goal of spontaneity and control in mind. We then evaluated these concepts on two criteria: impact to user and ease of implementation. This exercise helped us to narrow to three rough concepts, which we developed more fully in paper-prototype form and took back into the field to explore the positioning of our service with potential customers.

Once we honed in on the concept of a neighborhood market on wheels, we began to prototype the experience (read more about our experience prototypes in question 7)—testing different elements of our service model, such as food layout, flow and pricing structure. This real-world context helped us to solidify the touchpoints of our service, which we developed in more detail through our service blueprint and business model.

As a final step, The Merchant and Muse came to life in a full-scale, foam-core mock-up of the truck, complete with food and signage as it would appear on the street.

The Merchant and Muse upends old and new models of grocery shopping. First, the old: for those of us who work a 9-to-5 (or a 9-to-7, more likely), grocery shopping happens on the weekends. But this once-a-week shop doesn’t fit the way we live our lives now. The once-a-week shop requires planning; you need to know when you’ll be home during the week and anticipate what you’ll want to eat. For our target audience, these are unknowns. The result? They either skip the grocery store all together, or let ingredients waste away at the back of their fridge.

New models of grocery shopping are popping up—like Fresh Direct or Instacart—to try and solve this ingredient puzzle, but they make a big mistake. They equate food shopping with buying printer paper on Amazon, employing the same interface and experience. While some folks might be willing to give up the sensory experience of grocery shopping in the interest of convenience, our team believes that you can have both: the spontaneity of ordering delivery, and the control to pick and choose your produce at a grocery store. This new model of food shopping encourages the daily shop, as opposed to a weekly trip, thus making it easier to cook good food fast and reducing overall food waste.

The Merchant and Muse experience is optimized around the impromptu meal to help people shop quickly and cook better—no planning necessary. --

Our grocery truck makes a handful of stops in your neighborhood from 4-10pm daily. You can run into us on your corner, or check our app to find out where we’ll be. Online, learn about the food we’re featuring that night and get inspired with ideas for dinner. You also have the option to share thoughts on new truck locations and request new food for the truck to carry.

At the truck, you’ll find meats, grains and produce—all in portions perfect for dinner that night. Our ingredients are raw, but we help with light preparations to make getting dinner on the table a bit easier (think pre-snipped veggies). There’s a cook’s corner where you can purchase a few kitchen essentials—like oils and vinegar. Plus, we provide free spices to all our customers; a fun way to try something new without the hassle of buying, say, a year supply of coriander.

Throughout the browsing process, merchants are ready to help with friendly advice—providing inspiration, rather than instruction. When you’ve selected your ingredients, payment is quick with round-number pricing; we also have an option for a house account for customers who prefer a monthly bill.

At home, check out what others are cooking up, or contribute yourself. Share a photo of your dinner triumphs for a chance to be featured on the truck and win a tasty gift card.

Our service attributes of spontaneity and control served as the backbone of our project—the continuous frame for developing and evaluating our concept. To determine how such attributes might manifest themselves, we explored multiple research and play-acting techniques. For example, as we positioned our service, we sketched out an initial journey and presented this to our class through a short skit. This exercise helped us to begin testing our essential leverage points and develop hypotheses on which touchpoints really mattered. With the class’ feedback, we shifted away from a focus on mobile interactions in favor of a tighter articulation on the lived experience.

This new direction meant that it was imperative for us to get the physical interactions and experience at the truck just right. To get there, we launched two phases of experience prototypes. In our first phase, we set up a rough display of food as stimulus for open discussion with participants; these conversations helped us to better plan for our second round of prototyping, which was more expansive. In our second phase, we were specifically interested in testing food layout, flow and pricing structure. To do so, we set up ‘shop’ in a space at our school—buying, packaging and displaying food as it would appear on the truck. Fellow students were then given specific scenarios based on our service attributes (“You have 10 minutes to shop for dinner before you need to rush home!”) and asked to run through the service, from browse to buy. At the end, participants filled out a quick survey to review the experience.

We gained valuable information from both prototypes and adjusted our service accordingly. For example, before this research, our team had been debating whether to price in per-meal bundles or simply per-ingredient. Running through the experience made us aware of the complications involved in meal pricing. We switched to pricing per-ingredient for our final service to allow customers full flexibility and stay true to our mantra of control. This prototype also helped us to explore our hypothesis of inspiration over instruction. We tested the number of employees we needed at the truck, where employees should be positioned, the level and tone of employee-customer engagement, along with signage and wayfinding.

With fodder from our experience prototypes, we built out the specifics of our service blueprint—mapping front- and back-of-house interactions, channels and partners. In instances where we were unsure of an interaction point, we went back to research. For example, our team wanted to test how people might learn about our service in the first place, and how they might give feedback on truck locations. In this spirit, we launched a gorilla chalk campaign, drawing on the street and asking people if they’d want a grocery truck in that specific location—with a call-to-action to our social media outlets (twitter and foursquare). These research tactics—some quick and dirty, others choreographed—were essential to determining the final articulation of our concept and testing what it really means for a service to offer both spontaneity and control.