Saveful: Helping People Save Food, Money, Time and the Planet

Validation
Our initial brief was to create an app that could be paired with a food-waste-weighing device. Instead of doing exactly as asked, we asked: will people actually use this? User research said they wouldn’t. It was too arduous and the focus on waste added to a sense of guilt and overwhelm when Saveful wanted to effect empowerment.

So, we formed a new hypothesis: Saveful could help home cooks save food – and money – by empowering them to make meals with food they already had. We checked: this proposition resonated with users.

Co-design
The Saveful app was co-designed with everyone from busy families to chefs. Subject-matter experts including chef and restaurateur Matt Moran were brought in. The design team extracted the ingrained knowledge and ‘framework cooking’ methodology out of a sustainable chef’s head and into a Saveful app prototype. As a result, the Saveful app is an intuitive, guided user experience, that integrates helpful hacks and tips into every framework helping people learn while they cook.

Iteration & partnerships
After rounds of designs and testing, the Saveful core features of Make, Hack, and Track were settled on. Saveful is proving appealing to major Australian brands looking to create a more sustainable tomorrow, including brand partners such as Birds Eye, Maggi, Bega, and even Australia’s national airline: Qantas – which could put Saveful into the hands of 14 million users. Australia’s Minister for the Environment and Water, and multiple state governments have supported Saveful’s launch as a practical tool to help meet Australia’s waste targets.

Designed for global scale
Adapative design components can be adjusted for geographic seasonalities, measurement systems and languages. Which suits Saveful as they push into Americato supercharge their impact at rapid speed.

Saveful’s goal is to make it easy to save food and enjoyable to cook for as many people as possible. With that in mind, we set out to design a set of clear, intuitive and fun interaction patterns – and a completely scaleable solution – so our users can focus on the food (not what button they need to press in the app).

The user experience went through numerous iterations from sketches on whiteboards to wireframes to low- then high-fidelity prototypes to final designs. Everything was vetted and tested to ensure ease of use. The team also created new interaction patterns to cater for Saveful’s unique flexible meal plans – allowing users to pick and mix ingredients and generate their own one-of-a-kind meals.

Our colour palette, design system and unique ’flexible framework’ model were developed to make cooking and saving food accessible for everyone aged 8 to 80 – and for all dietaries, too. Furthermore, Saveful’s custom-designed flexible meal framework methodology takes a way of cooking normally reserved for an elite few – highly-trained professional chefs – and puts it into the hands of the masses to help them save food, money, and time.

One of the features of Saveful is a full-screen cooking mode, where a user can clearly see what the recipe requires, and accommodates single-digit navigation (perfect for dirty hands). Since Saveful launched in November 2023, we’ve observed this pattern gradually popping up in other cooking apps.

The Saveful app is already garnering an organic following in Europe and America. And America’s second-largest grocery store – which serves over 11 million customers every day – is so impressed by Saveful’s potential for far-reaching impact that they’re currently in discussions with Saveful to build out a partnered version of the app.

We can’t change who people are, but we can change their behaviour. Saveful took the serious and overwhelming problem of food waste – a problem costing Australian families $2500 every year at a time when 80% of them are feeling the pinch of the rising cost of living – and made it seriously simple to positively impact. How? By swapping ‘what’s for dinner’ fatigue for fun and fluid kitchen creations.

The idea of reversing the recipe rulebook is the design innovation at the heart of the Saveful app.

The Saveful app and its flexible meal framework methodology is the first of its known kind in Australia. Users can browse by inspiration, choosing the meals that appeal to their palates and then pick and mix ingredients they want to use up. Or, they can search by ingredients and see a list of meals that best utilise what they’ve got. Looking to out-of-field sources of inspiration like Spotify and Instagram to inspire the methodology flow, and filled with timely tips, moments of celebration and encouragement, the Saveful user experience is fun and fluid proven by its rapid growth from 0 to 19,000+ users in 8 months.

Importantly, Saveful’s flexible meal frameworks give people the power and confidence to shop their fridge and make tasty food with what they’ve got. The systems and design thinking to make an ingrained, fluid thought process of an expert chef accessible to the average home cook was no small feat. In doing so, Saveful introduces a novel way of cooking to generations of cooks who were used to following prescriptive recipes – and hungry to protect the planet.

Saveful’s impact is tracked through several metrics and user analytics. Pre-make surveys check in with users to see what ingredients were already on hand, thus measuring food being used up and diverted from waste. Post-make surveys help close the loop for users who choose not to complete the pre-make survey.

Optional weekly surveys measure further behaviour changes like how much food is being thrown out each week, if there were leftovers (and what happened to them), and what kinds of foods are being thrown out. Users can see the impact of their actions through metrics like potential food savings (based upon the food they use up in meals made), and how this figure equates to potential dollar and CO2 emission savings. Plus, compare their week-on-week results.

8 months since launching, Saveful has helped home cooks use up around 2,500kg of food – diverting it away from home kitchen bins and into hungry tummies at a time when every spare dollar counts, equating to a potential reduction of around 4,750kg of CO2 emissions.

Users say Saveful’s flexible meal frameworks are a revelation. Federal and State Governments have supported Saveful, 5 local government areas (that’s 250k homes) are on board. The Saveful School Challenge has been launched to 850 Australian schools.

Furthermore, Saveful educates users on the seasonality of the produce they consume, helping people choose local produce and gain more nutritional value out of what they’re eating.

Saveful builds on and contributes to the reputation of Victoria as Australia’s most dynamic and innovative foodie scene – a place where every morsel of food is celebrated and savoured. Saveful helps people save more and waste less.

Did you know that throwing away one burger wastes the same amount of water as a 90-minute shower? Each year, Australia wastes over 7.3 million tonnes of food. And about 2,600 Gigalitres of water is used to grow food that isn’t used. That’s the volume of 5 Sydney Harbours.

Saveful has been designed to divert perfectly edible food away from bins and onto the plates of Aussies (and people all around the world) at a time when many families (80% of Australian families, to be precise) are finding it financially difficult to put meals on the table.

By teaching people how to use up the food they have, stretch their ingredients by doing things like turning their scraps into stock and their stalks into stir-fry, and transition from a ’best before’ to a ’best after’ mindset – Saveful is designing out food waste and pollution. Saveful is helping people all across the globe realise that our food choices impact more than just our waistlines.

Best of all, it’s free and available to anyone with a mobile phone.