Saving buffets from covid
PROJECT: BSC thesis
Client: jesper’s torvekøkken
PROduct: lunchbox concept
CHALLENGE
Denmark's largest catering company, Jespers Torvekøkken, urgently needed to rethink their business model. Their main service was providing lunch buffet catering to companies, but overnight this was stopped due to Covid-19 hygiene restrictions. The quick fix would be to switch to delivering portioned lunches in disposable packaging, but this would clash with their strong commitment to sustainability. Instead, they turned to us with the question: How can we survive as a lunch caterer during a pandemic? How can we reimagine buffets?
PROCESS
A commercial kitchen is a fast-paced and highly optimized environment and for our solution to be successful, we needed to fully understand the context we were designing for. So we threw on some hairnets and entered the busy life in the kitchen. Through shadowing and interviewing we learned about the staff's workflows and their biggest barriers for adopting a new solution. To involve them in the design process the solution concepts were co-developed and evaluated through workshops. SOLUTION
The final product is a reusable lunch box consisting of three separate parts: a hard plastic bottom shell, a metal tray for the food, and a see-through air sealing plastic lid. When the lid is pressed down, all three parts securely seals together and the air gap between the bottom shell and metal tray creates a thermal effect to keep food warm. This modular design makes it easy to replace broken parts, and because the parts are produced in clean materials they are easy to recycle at EOL. This design is also cheap to produce as no assembly is needed. Alongside the product, a take-back system was designed for Jespers Torvekøkken on how to facilitate the return loop. 
