Creating a "bean-ingful" food experiences at Universities

University students often struggle to maintain healthy eating habits. Juggling assignments, social events, and new friendships, often turning to fast food or quick meals as their go-to food choices.

A behavioral design project at ID with a team of 3 designers.

CLIENT

Food and Climate League

TEAM

4 Designers, Faculty and PhD Students

DURATION

14 Weeks

Project Description

During the behavioral design workshop, our team of three designers, including myself, focused on applying behavioral design methods to encourage university students to consume more beans. We utilized several behavioral frameworks to analyze student behaviors, identify pain points, and develop strategies to increase bean consumption across different areas and infrastructures.

University students and young professionals find beans unappealing and unfamiliar in everyday meals.

Students show openness to eating more beans - an opportunity for change via taste, convenience, health messaging, and social influence. Normalizing bean dishes could shift the perception and reposition beans as flavor-packed, relatable, intuitive everyday foods.

Insights

Through desk research, test experiments, and intercepts, we derived a few motivators that govern students’ eating choices in universities and schools.

We found out..

Food offerings that unlock unique flavors & experiences through beans, when reframed as nutritional flavor powerhouses, can motivate students to incorporate them more frequently into their daily diets.

STRATEGY 1

Exploratory Meal Offerings

Catering to Gen Z's love for culinary experiments, this initiative offers a variety of convenient and tasty experimental dishes tailored for university life. About half (47%) of Gen Z-ers say that they prefer to visit restaurants that offer new or innovative flavors and ingredients.

Hype Meals Pop-Ups

Meals that generate buzz and are centered around popular and exploratory dishes to develop interest.

Flavor Companion Sides

Flavor-packed sides by your favorite proteins or meal to expose students to new exploratory dishes.

Hype Meals

Incorporating beans in the cafeteria's occasional “Hype Meals”, featuring diverse flavors, engaging textures, and healthy options, aims to generate buzz for upcoming popular and interesting dishes.

• Tapping into the feeling of curiosity and surprise towards novel ideas.
• Creating a sense of limited availability that can increase desirability and anticipation.
• Nudging beans towards flavorful stars of the meal.

Flavor Companion Side Dishes

Flavorful ingredients drive food selection; taste pairings and the palate-enhancing role of beans enhance overall meal satisfaction. Using beans in side dishes that complement and layered next to the main dish, can help augment the meal.

Bean-infused sides provide

• “Value-addition” effect to meal
• Contrasting components enhance the main dishes as a whole set.
• Creates balance across the meal experience.
• Creating a place for beans in the meal set across cuisines; boosts familiarity

STRATEGY 2

Reframing labels

Employing cuisine-inspired names with flavor-forward adjectives plus benefit descriptors shifts the focus toward taste and nutrition rather than ingredients alone. By avoiding overt “bean” mentions, optimizes sensory and conceptual details and invites discovery.

Creative Labels

Storytelling labels engage Gen Z's attraction to experiences, thoughtful names invite orientation towards benefits

Digital Menus

Appealing descriptions tap health and taste perceptions, descriptions heighten flavor enjoyment and familiarity.

Creative Labels

Introducing descriptors emphasizing cuisines, origins, and flavors that craft a narrative for dishes, showcasing complimentary tastes and offering consumers more information for heightened interest and engagement in trying dishes.

Digital Menus

Digital menus featuring similar descriptions, appealing images, and tagged characteristics can help students quickly identify and choose meals that align with their preferences, needs, and taste explorations.

Initiatives

‘Flavor’ forward communication has better reception rather than overtly ‘bean’ tagged dishes - which drives the perception of beans as a tasty component.

Better positioned to envision beans when their health & flavour benefits are highlighted

Using playfulness and ironic messaging that Gen-Z resonates with will help reach the audience more naturally.

IDEA 1

Flavor Focused

Craving flavorful food that's still healthy? These globally inspired bowls were made to power you. Piled 'em high with tasty beans, spices, herbs, and lots of feel-good plant power to fuel busy student schedules. We stuffed in comforting, homemade vibes too—the rich flavors are straight from the kitchens of India, Mexico, Morocco, and around the world. Protein and energy are crammed in every bite to help crush exams, papers, and power through all-nighters. No more compromising on flavor for health!

Is exam season dragging you down? Recharge with this robust veggie chili - protein & flavor to power you through!

#powerthroughflavor

IDEA 2

Benefit Focused

Hey university friends, have you taken your veggies for the day? 🌽 Don't let the grind make forget your power greens and beans! Add some protein-packed legumes, fresh crisp salads, or roasted broccoli to balance your meals. Cause we know long study nights are ahead and you gotta fuel right to crush it. We're lookin' out for you with tasty, healthy additions...now where's those beans at? 🫘🌱 Join our veggie-lovin' community and feel the rainbow power! 🔥 🥗🌮🍛

Join the #WheresTheVeggies movement and discover a culinary adventure that's both delicious and sustainable.

Infrastructure

What conditions need to be present for this to work? What would be the archetype needed for this to be implemented? Also listed are the infrastructural levers that can be utilized.

Impacts

The impact of these mechanisms to encourage increased bean consumption can be monitored through multiple methods that demonstrate changes in behavior and mindset.

01

Map the shift in perceptions of beans from unappealing to broadly favorable.

02

Assess university students' familiarity with beans through everyday meal options.

03

Analyze the ratio of meat-only to meat-and-side meal consumption.

Next Steps

Choose universities in metro cities; through a research plan identify and understand student habits, motivators and stressors.

Culinary rematch: Aligning menus to develop reimagined recipes with a prominent role of beans in the meal, powered by flavor.

Identify infrastructural levers and changes across large universities to activate these mechanisms linearly.

Pilot an on-ground marketing campaign in a university with a diverse population of student body; collect feedback.

Process Appendix

Check out the process and frameworks used for this project below:

You can also check out the Mural board to look at our process, but messier

Like my designs? Or want to work together? Hit me up on LinkedIn or mail.

Let's Chat

apatil54@id.iit.edu
+1 (312) 866 7105

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