It’s been over a month since I’ve posted on my projects here, so I thought I’d give you a little update.

To date I’ve run 3 experiments: The Fridge Whisperer, The Never-Ending Pantry, and Kitchen Quest.

Each experiment has taught me something new about my audience. The Fridge Whisperer taught me that people didn’t always have ingredients on hand. The Never-Ending pantry revealed that while people loved receiving the boxes, many still couldn’t find the time to actually cook using them. And Kitchen Quest showed that texting people reminders, providing step-by-step goals and adding just a smidge of friendly competition actually can motivate people to cook—for some, even multiple times a week.

I’ve been doing a lot of mulling over about what the next thing to do is. Should I do more experiments? Should I iterate on one of the experiments I’ve done so far? And I think I’ve finally come to a decision.

I will continue with Kitchen Quest, but under a new name. It will be called Scratch House. Why? I simply like the sound of it. It’s scrappy and fun and not so narrowly focused on a medieval theme. I have started building a web-based prototype, with the part-time help of my husband who is a very talented developer. The prototype will take many of the existing elements of Kitchen Quest, but allow people to progress at their own pace through the missions.

Thank you for being a part of MixHeatRepeat! It has been an incredible learning experience and I look forward to continuing it with Scratch House.

If you are interested in following along with my adventures, follow the (just created) Scratch House blog or sign up for updates at http://scratchhouse.co.

Overall Response

Last Tuesday, Experiment #3 officially came to a close. All in all, 12 people signed up to play and 7 people actively joined the game once it started.

The response was very encouraging: Over the course of 6 days, I received a total of 29 completed quest pictures, plus 10 “talisman” pictures. (These were small objects used in the submitted photos to idenitify the players’ handiwork.)

Observations

A few interesting things happened over the course of the game…

Keep reading

Overall Response

A total of 9 people purchased a box from The Never-Ending Pantry in the span of 1.5 weeks! Four of them were people I’d never met. This definitely exceeded the “friendship bubble” for testing out new ideas, and to me that seems like a pretty good sign.

But Did People Cook?

To my knowledge, 3 people have cooked their boxes so far. Two Tweeted their results…

Keep reading

Experiment 2, The Never-Ending Pantry, is about testing the idea of physicality: let’s send people an actual ingredient, not just ideas for what to cook, and see if it helps them get cooking.

After about 2 weeks since launching a very quickly thrown-together site, the experiment is off to a good start. I received 8 orders in total.

So this week, I spent quite a bit of time buying supplies, printing, cutting, folding, hand-binding, measuring, filling, and running to the post office. Our apartment was a creative madhouse of scissors, paper, string, and cardboard!

The boxes have now been mailed out, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the response is. But for now, here’s a sneak peek at what went into this whole endeavor:

The scene on our dining room table last Friday…

Laying out the booklet pages in order… which is harder than it looks (next time I am definitely putting page numbers on page designs).

Because I did not want to buy another stapler (ours was not long enough to reach to the center of the binding), I decided to hand sew each book. This was actually the most enjoyable part of the entire thing… there is something very relaxing about sewing a book. :)

Putting the finishing touches on the booklet by slicing apart some of the pages. This makes the book a little more fun and interactive…

Packaging the ingredient!

Into the boxes they go.

And off to the post office!

If you are curious how the economics worked out…

Costs:

• 6 lbs of pasta: $12
• paper & cover stock for the booklets: $37.99
• boxes and newsprint for stuffing boxes: $14.75
• food-safe bags for packing ingredients: $5.95
• postage for 5 boxes (the rest will be hand-delivered): $29.45
• Total: $100.14

Time spent:

• hand-making booklets: 7 hours
• buying supplies: 3 hours
• packaging ingredients: 1 hour
• packing and addressing boxes: 1 hour
• trip to post office: 1 hour
• Total: 13 hours

Revenue:

• minus Stripe credit card processing charges: $102.15

So by the time the boxes were all packed and sent, I just barely broke even. Hooray!

All in all the goal was not to make this into a viable business, but to use it 1) to test interest and 2) as a way to foster dialogue with people around cooking. To that end I think the 8 orders proved that there is interest—people putting actual money towards an idea is a strong signal. The next step is to see what the dialogue will be!

A total of 5 people contacted The Fridge Whisperer for help:

• 2 people received recommendations and cooked the recommended dishes
• 2 people received recommendations but have not yet reponded with whether or not they cooked
• 1 person declared total fridge bankruptcy, and instead asked for suggestions for what to buy

To better understand why people did and did not participate, I sent out a survey; 7 people responded. Here’s a summary of the results.

Some preliminary conclusions:

• A third of this very small sample size said they did not have anything in their fridge or pantry. I suspect more people had empty fridges they just didn’t take the survey.
• Grocery shopping is convenient for most people, but only half had a regular grocery shopping schedule. The rest went whenever they felt it was necessary, which, if they did not cook, wasn’t often.
• Out of the 5 people who contacted The Fridge Whisperer, only one had a fridge that looked well-stocked.
• If people do have things in their fridge, The Fridge Whisperer is actually a helpful resource.

These results may not be statistically significant in any way, but they’ve given me a sense of the problems that really plague people who are trying to cook more. Before Experiment #1, my theory was people would cook if they only knew what to make. However, this experiment revealed that the problem is less informational and more physical in nature. People can’t cook anything if they literally don’t have anything in their fridge.

For the next experiment, I will be tacking this problem head-on by sending people some ingredients. Let’s see how it goes!