Latitude

Contributing editor: Marina Miloslavsky.

Latitude is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Shareable for its Food, Connected study! Results will be posted to both life-connected.com and Shareable.net.

Food & the Rise of Information

Fast Company recently selected “The 8 Biggest Kitchen Innovations of the Last Decade.” While a number were—predictably—devices, 2 of the 8 selections were Web-based (the epicurious iPhone app and freshdirect.com).

Food is integral to the way we live, with far-reaching effects on the environment, personal health and enjoyment. Latitude is conducting a 42 study to understand how new connectivity—improved accessibility, transparency, and organization of information—alters our desires and decisions around food and food-purchasing, with implications for retail experiences in general.

Using computers, including hand-helds and smartphones, we can make our preferences better known to the people who bring us the food we buy and eat: farmers, processors, distributors and retailers. We can demand and eventually get precisely the kind of food we want.

Essentially, the power to change the way we shop for food, the way it gets delivered to us and ultimately the way it gets produced.

New York Times, “The Way We Live Now: Faster Slow Food”

These recent technological innovations are empowering people with information; they’re filling gaps in the food shopping experience that we may not have even acknowledged previously, but which have a significant impact on the way we live.

Latitude 42: Food, Connected from latddotcom on Vimeo.

To participate in the study, click here.
Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Latitude’s 42 aims to explore these gaps more fully, to understand how existing solutions can be repurposed to fill these gaps, and to discover novel opportunities rooted in real needs and desires.

A Taste of the Future

In an earlier post on the projected future of food shopping, we speculated what the opportunity space for “information innovations” might look like—search-filtering by personal preferences like health, price, and food origins, and digital grocery lists with “smart memory,” recommendation capabilities, and compatibility with online grocery stores.

(Food for thought: up-and-coming blippy.com socializes real-time purchasing, asking “What are people buying right now?” and Ikan is a home bar-code scanner that digitizes your store list as you throw items away, then provides home delivery for items on the list—”the Netflix of groceries.”)

Narrative Analysis: the Power of Personal Storytelling

Personal narratives are the chosen “input” for this 42 study (textual, audio, or video formats). Implicitly or explicitly, structured storytelling can indicate “problems” (needs/desires), and suggest the latent or future solutions that could fill these gaps to better improve an individual’s experience.

More than traditional surveys, narrative analysis can reduce the gap which results from what individuals say versus what they actually do.  (A study called “Reality Bites,” which profiled the behavior of 1000 UK grocery shoppers against their stated attitudes on health, environmentally responsible purchasing, etc. found significant discrepancies here.)

Latitude 42: Food, Connected

Tell us about a specific instance during a grocery-shopping trip where you wished you had more information of some sort.  This can be any type of information – food origin, health, price, location in the store, or anything else that was frustrating during your experience.

To participate in the study, click here.

Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Email innovation@latd.com if you have any questions, or to request more information.

Follow Latitude 42: Food, Connected study updates here.

Header image courtesy of yourdon’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.