Scenario Study #2: Welcome to Manu's Kitchen

Manuel Payà is a university student in Barcelona. He moved to Barcelona three years ago and he decided to start his college far from his family who live in Amsterdam. He was living in an apartment with three people.  They had a good relation from the beginning, but he realized that it was not easy to share his space with other people. His favorite time of the day was lunch and dinner, where he could be alone and in some occasion be surrounded with his roommates and commented the day. However, since he started to work as an intern every afternoon in a startup, he had to change his lifestyle and cut his time to cook. He had 45 minutes after class and before start working.

We wanted to experience and observe how this possible customer live, how he took decisions regarding what to cook, what he usually had in his fridge and what were the most common meals he ate. We decided to live with him one week, everyday going to his apartment in lunch and dinner time, be with him in the supermarket, and see how and when he decided what to cook.

He used to go once or twice to the supermarket to get what he needed. He used to buy always the same kind of food and prepare the same dishes. From tuna salad to grill chicken with mushrooms, spaghettis with tomato and cheese or Spanish omelet with bread and tomato. However, he explained us that because he had limit of time at this hour of the day, he did not wanted to experience new recipes and less to go and buy the ingredients he needed to follow what a cookbook specified.

So what we did the following week was to give him a list of different dishes he could make with the same kind of food he used to buy. Additionally, we offer different meals specially created for days with no more than 30 minutes to cook, or if he wanted more healthy dishes. He realized that with the same food he used to buy and with the same time, he could make a variety of more than 12 different dishes he would never try. He did not needed to change his routine and it gave him an easier and a simple way to enjoy his food.

Manuel decided to keep all the different dishes and one week later he was happy with the results. He enjoy better the time to cook and also he was surprise of how many dishes we could make with no additional effort. 

We want to thank Manuel for his time and his contribution to this work! 
By: Silvia Rubio