Executive Summary

The purpose of the Garage course is to put into practice entrepreneurial skills, apply the knowledge acquired in the core lectures and make your own idea turn into reality. With Verco, we established a Start-up tackling the issue of manual food tracking and efficient meal planning mostly present in the health & wellness industry. Passioned about eliminating domestic food waste we found a solution that solves this environmental problem alongside improving the time-consuming meal planning and tracking process of the fitness niche. Linking these two problems in one solution provides benefit for the user as well as for the planet.

Goal

Our mission is to save time and money through an automated inventory tracking system. We want to bring joy and comfort to the food tracking & cooking experience while eliminating domestic food waste.

Methodology

Starting off in March 2020, our team conducted three rounds of online surveys with around 150 participants each in order to validate our assumptions regarding our customer, the problem and our value proposition. The first survey had a broad and general audience, the second one was focused on households as an entity and the last survey was tailored for the fitness niche. Furthermore, various in-depth interviews with head chefs, students, retail sales persons and a community member of the dumpsters helped us gain a wide understanding about the various facets of the existing problems and phenomenons. Moreover, our team tested the prototype in a self-experiment lasting one week.

Results

In the beginning we overestimated the willingness of our initial target group (households) to make an effort in order to gain convenience in the kitchen life. As a result of our surveys, we discovered that the pain of reducing domestic food waste is for the majority of people not important enough to alter their behaviour. At the same time, we discovered that members of the fitness community showed great interest in our solution since they could save a lot of their time spent on meal planning and food tracking. Therefore, we pivoted and tailored the solution composed of RFID-tags and a receiver (mat with an integrated scale) to the health and wellness industry.

Cooperation Partner

• VERCO – Sustainable Smart Home Systems

Contact Person

• Michal Filzmoser

• michael.filzmoser@tuwien.ac.at

Student Team

• Daria Dalichuk

• Alexandra Kick

• Alexander Kleinsasser

• Jakob Langreiter

• Nino Perez-Salado

Project Managers

• Michal Filzmoser

• Dragos-Cristian Vasilescu

• Alexander Staub

• Michael Ambros

• Thomas Pannermayr