A Smart Recipe Planner
which helps chefs to create novel dishes while aiming at sustainable food solutions
About
Food is an essential nutritional source for all humans, yet tons of food is wasted at an increasing rate each year. Although previous HCI studies examined this issue, most of this work focuses on the domestic context. To the best of our knowledge, no study explored the food waste in hospitality sector from a design perspective. Addressing this gap, we made observations in the high-end hotel restaurant kitchen and interviews with ten chefs to better understand the sources of food waste in restaurants.
Interviews
We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with seven chefs and three instructors of culinary arts. We chose to interview with chefs because they are the primary decision-makers during food preparations in the kitchens; in other words they are on the top of the kitchen hierarchy. They create recipes, manage the operations of the restaurants, lead the subordinates, and even, they may provide consultancy to people who want to set up a new restaurant about its concept and menu creation.
Field Study
We conducted two field observations in a high-end hotel restaurant in İstanbul. We chose a high-end hotel restaurant as they are the places having many actors involved in the scenario, suppliers, kitchen and customers. Then, we interviewed two executive chefs for approximately one hour. We probed the reasons for food waste, the strategies they use to deal with this waste and the influence of serving styles on food waste.
Related Publications
Hüseyin Uğur Genç, Mert Yıldız, Hakan Yılmazer, and Aykut Coşkun. 2019. Stop Wasting, Start Tasting! Design Speculations for Reducing Food Waste in The Hospitality Sector. In Companion Publication of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2019 Companion (DIS ’19 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 171-176. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3301019.3323880
Project Members
Hüseyin Uğur Genç, Mert Yıldız, Hakan Yılmazer, Aykut Coşkun