The tasks for this week were to conduct simple experiments to get a better understanding of our idea and what direction to proceed and to go from a level 1 idea to a level 2 idea that’s ready for prototyping. Before conducting the experiments we formulated different hypotheses as this lays the ground for the reasoning behind and what we expect to gain from doing the experiments. The different hypotheses are a follows:
Hypothesis 1: What are people’s baking habits and are they willing to buy ready-made dough?
The first experiment we conducted was to answer the first hypothesis, i.e. whether people were willing to and interested in buying ready-made dough.
We first conducted a semi-structured interview, to build our basis for a survey, with two students, aged 23 and 25, to gain qualitative knowledge. We wanted to find out what experiences people had with baking on their own, how often they buy bread or bake themselves, and whether they thought our concept would be helpful.
Three parameters were found to be important for the interviewees:
- Price
- Time
- Quality
Furthermore, the interviewees mentioned that they were willing to buy ready-made dough as long as the price was not too high and the finished baked bread was still high quality. One of the interviewees also stated that the social element of baking was important.
We further created a survey with Google Survey with simple questions about food waste and if people would be interested in buying dough instead of making it themselves with 165 respondents. This was mainly aimed at retrieving quantitative information about potential customers. We posted the survey on our own Facebook pages as well as in a Facebook group called “Det Gode Brød” with 2.700 members for baking enthusiasts. Hence, we gained a broader understanding of our target group and their wishes. We analyzed and split the data into four age groups; 19-29, 30-44, 45-64, and 65+.
Snippets of the survey are shown below:
The younger part of the respondents (19-29 years old), as well as the older part (65+ years old), were the age groups that were most willing to buy ready-made dough. The age group 30-44 were also somewhat willing with almost half of the respondents answering yes.
Additionally, the most frequent reasons for people to bake their own bread was the economic aspect (27%), better quality (76.6%), and the social aspect (67.9%). The most frequent reasons for people not to bake their own bread was the economic aspect (14%), baking is troublesome ( 52.7%), quality (6.5%), and the time it takes to make bread (79.6%).
Hypothesis 2: People throw out large amounts of bread per week
As the respondents of the survey were mainly baking enthusiasts, not many threw much bread out in relation to how frequently they bake. Only about 25% of the respondents threw out a small amount of bread each week. If the respondents were not baking enthusiasts, it may have had an impact on the data. The respondents were very aware of food waste with 83.6% answering that they think about food waste and 76.4% answering that they actively take action in reducing their own or their family’s food waste.
Hypothesis 3: Dough is cheap to make and produce
To test this hypothesis, we searched the internet for the price of dough requirements, i.e. flour, yeast, grains, and so forth. Also, we searched for buying large amounts of these requirements from mills that make flour and grains.
These searches showed that these requirements were cheap to buy, especially in large batches. For example, we found one distributor who sold 12.5 kilos of wheat flour for 96 DKK. This is, of course, depending on type of flour, how much that goes into each individual bread, etc. We estimate that each dough will cost approximately 10 kr. to produce per kilo, which is cheap compared to how many buns or loaves of bread customers are able to make with one-kilo dough.
Hypothesis 6: Dough can stay fresh for at least a couple of days in the fridge
To test this hypothesis, we made an Internet search for an average of how long a dough can last in the fridge. We found articles (e.g. https://www.thespruceeats.com/retarding-427620) mentioning that dough can last approximately three days in the fridge, which depends on the amount of salt and yeast. Some videos and articles mentions that dough can last up to a week in the fridge and weeks or months in the freezer.