EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Assiduous is an idea for an automated produce broker platform to streamline the process of buying fruits and vegetables inf bulk for supermarkets and was developed in the E&I project course Garage in SS2022.

Goal

We wanted to create a platform, where buyers and producers will get connected, have an overview of all the fruits and vegetables available and can order directly through our platform. The order will be sent to the producers over our system to avoid unnecessary additional work. Through the increased automation of the process, we are able to offer lower rates than our competitors in order to increase profits for supermarkets or pass down savings to consumers. We wanted to develop this system with all major supermarket chains in Austria in mind and build it in a way to make an expansion into the whole EU possible.

Methodology

In Garage the overarching method is to apply the lean start-up approach to an idea that was selected through a crowd voting process. After the crowd voting, the selected founders pitched their ideas, and each potential co-founder presented their own skills and ambitions with the goal of building a capable team.

We went through 5 iterations of our business model, during which the base idea of automating the acquisition of fruits and vegetables stayed constant, however we conducted interviews with potential customers at each stage to find out which segment would benefit the most from our concept. We mostly did in person interviews, but also sent out a survey to over 50 different businesses, who might be potential customers.

Furthermore, we went through 3 rounds of prototypes, where we first drew a representation of a feature of our platform, after which we created a click dummy to show to potential customers and finally, we hosted a responsive website, to test how users would interact with it.

Results

Our idea went through multiple major transformations. At the end after testing all possibilities, we focused on the largest fruit and vegetable buyers and sellers. With our system, every major producer is able to sell his products to every major buyer without the need to of extensive unnecessary paperwork and at the lowest observed fee.

Through our software, we are able to save around 70% of the human and financial resources involved in the process. We had interest from both major supermarket chains and major producers; to prove this we were actually able to secure an LOI with one of the largest tomato producers, Zeiler Tomaten. Supermarket chains also found our idea promising, however due to compliance issues we were not yet able to hold talks.

Cooperation Partner

• Assiduous - assiduous.netlify.app

Contact Person

• Matteo Theuer - matteo.theuer@s.wu.ac.at

Student Team

• André Ghoreishi

• Amadeus Göttinger

• Caroline Eriksson

• Sybille Brunet

• Matteo Theuer

Project Manager

• Thomas Pannermayr

• Alexander Staub