Lowco
The Food App that has an appetite for change.
Lowco is an app that tracks and calculates the amount of food miles and Carbon dioxide emissions you produce from your weekly food shop.
Through conducting primary research with a variety of supermarket food shoppers, I was able to understand how often people do their food shopping and how much of an impact their regular food had on the environment due to where the food has come from. It gave me an understanding of where and why my product was needed in the current food economy. Lowco is my response to eventually change behaviour surrounding importation of food and what food we buy.
User Research.
I wanted to get a better understanding of how far our food travels. So, I got 6 people to send me their weekly shops so I could calculate an estimate of milage their food travels every week to every month. It was interesting to get weekly shops from people who shop at different supermarket brands and it helped me acknowledge that food milage is a current problem that needs to be made aware of.
Creating a Logo.
I needed to create a brand that reflected the values and core message of Lowco. Therefore, I experimented with logo design and developed the slogan of ‘appetite for change’.
Final Logo.
The logo on the left is for the Lowco app and advertising and the logo on the right is for the App Store. I chose the colour blue as it is associated with health and understanding. The dotted circle represents the journey of food miles and how we can shop more locally like a community. The brand name ‘Lowco’ has a hidden message of ‘low co2’.
Traffic-light system .
To make Lowco more effective in supermarkets I needed to place it directly on food packaging so I created a packaging logo. However, there needed to be a system to make it easier to use for the user which is why I made this traffic light colour coded system. This means the user would be able to tell from a glance what foods were good and what foods were bad in terms of food milage and CO2e.
Packaging .
To raise awareness about food miles I thought it would be effective to print the amount of food milage in bold onto the specific food packaging. This would mean that if supermarket shoppers hadn’t downloaded the Lowco app yet they could still use the Lowco system and become aware of their food milage. This could persuade supermarket shoppers to download the app due to the shocking figures displayed.
How The App Works.
I made a video to give an example of how the user uses the Lowco app.
Print Advertisement.
To advertise the Lowco app I created a selection of poster designs outside supermarkets as shown above. They include a QR code which customers can scan in on their phones and it will direct them to download the app. If they have the app already they can scan the QR code on poster one and it will direct them to contribute to the daily food mile challenge.
Reward System.
To create loyal Lowco customers and to continue raising awareness about food miles and CO2e, I designed a rewards system that will give the user money off their shops the more times they use the app. These can be posted through letter boxes to create a larger audience and get more people to be familiar with Lowco when they go to the supermarket.
