Louie’s Leftovers is a program aimed to reduce food waste by providing a notification through NAUgo to let students know when there is leftover food at campus events. The program went live in November of 2018 and has been a success at supporting NAU’s food insecure students.
Jason and I discovered through conversations with staff that are responsible for organizing catering events that there was some confusion with the program. After doing some research and interviewing some staff members, we discovered the following weakness…
- The catering order form required staff to check a box indicating a desire to participate in the program. Requiring a commitment at this point seemed premature. The staff member was unsure whether they would have any leftover food during the ordering phase. This resulted in most staff declining to check the box and electing not to participate in the program.
- If the staff member did check the box, there were no further instructions given at that time on how to follow up with the program.
- Staff members that did elect to participate in the program, and did have leftover food, were required to stay at the location of the food for 25 minutes following the event. This was a difficult ask of staff. They typically had other responsibilities to attend to following their event and could not commit to staying.
Once we had collected the feedback from the staff members, we developed a preliminary plan on how to address these pain points.
This project is ongoing. Stay tuned for more updates.