Protoype II

Prototype II: Hearty Meals

The meal kit was born in Stockholm, Sweden. Kicki Theander, a mother of three observed that families want to eat home-cooked dinner but struggle to manage planning, purchasing, and cooking. She launched Middagsfrid translated “dinner time bliss” in 2007, a service that brought bag of groceries to people’s doors.

Our group of nurses noticed similarities in our patients who struggle to maintain self-management of their heart failure conditions. Our goal is to improve their eating habits in order to prevent worsening heart failure exacerbation which leads to frequent hospitalizations.

Our group use Joni’s parents for user testing and as part of our second prototype. Their main feedback since the first prototype was to clean up the packaging and to add more pictures to the recipe and education cards. Since the first prototype, we made our recipe cards with simple directions and pictures for meal preparation steps. The completed meal’s picture is on the recipe card so that customers can get an idea of what they are making each step. We also made our education cards more colorful and eye-catching. We looked at the American Heart Association website and felt their recipes were still too wordy for our direction cards so we simplified and combined steps to make the recipe short and to the point. We also observed other cooking websites and looked at how they organized the page. Most of them showed a picture of the finished meal, wordy directions, and wordy ingredients. Our recipe cards contain pictures as much as possible. Our colleague from class also agreed with having less words on the recipe and education cards. Our professor, Mary Joy, suggested that we include a rewards program, such as a discount on the meals for loyal customers. These are suggestions we took to improve on our second prototype.

During this second prototype, Joni’s parents made the Honey Glazed Salmon with Snap peas and brown rice. Overall, they were pleased by the improvement of the packaging and the promos on the website. Joni’s parents then suggested to add foods to avoid on the CHF tip cards, especially relating it to high sodium content. This addition can help customers make better food choices when they are eating food other than what is packaged in our meals.

Our group feels confident on the finalizing steps of our Hearty Meals service. We ordered stickers

with the hearty meals logo, made a user-friendly website, and laminated our first few CHF tip and recipe cards. We are excited to present the very first completed Hearty Meals package!