Reducing waste and optimizing technology for Odd box on a Group project

Working as a part of a marketing team requires many skills including intelligence, love, passion and a strategic approach towards the goals and objectives of any given task. There are many lessons to be learned from teamwork, one of the most important is that sometimes things do not work as we plan it to be, and this can cause confusion, stress and an undesired final result. But there is always a light at the end of the tunnel when a positive approach and a good plan is in place to validate the initial thoughts, concerns and considerations.

The groups initial task to analyse https://www.oddbox.co.uk which is a phenomenal business that benefits the environment and reduces food waste by selecting fruit and vegetables that are about to expire and resell this on a subscription basis to consumers in the London area.

Odd box connects with farmers around the UK who have fruit and vegetable that are about to be wasted and links these with consumers like yourself to select the size of the box you would like to receive at your doorstep.

Obviously you don't always receive the best looking fruit and vegetable, but you are conscious that you are reducing food waste and helping the environment.

I was assigned by the marketing team to analyse technological solutions that would help boost and improve Odd box business model to be more efficient, while providing consumers the same value proposition; the initial steps by our group of marketing specialists was to look at the current technology being used by the business, analysing their website, and finding out what their competitors are doing at the moment. We all collectively decided to conduct an in depth market research analysis into the possibility of using new technology and the team came up with a variety of practical cost-effective solutions that would benefit Odd box and improve their reputation through the use of NFC tags, AI and blockchain technology.

A colleague and I were assigned to dealing with the use of NFC tags for the business and how useful this could be for the company, we initially researched how many mobile phones in London are compatible with the technology and found that 70% of phones are readily available, we then looked at the benefits of NFC tags and found that they are fast, versatile, simple and no installation required, and the most important, not expensive to set up, however the drawbacks we found were related to data privacy, where someone could steal this data from a customer who receives a box at home, so we looked at encryption which resolved this hurdle, our final concern was where and how would we implement this, and we found that the best place would be the inside flap where the customer would be able to see it as soon as he opened the box, the team were happy with our findings, and we strategically implemented this into our final idea.

Below is a picture of our NFC tag idea.

We were very glad that this project was a huge success as we had 2 members from SAS Mike Turner and Neil Griffin who validated our initial ideation, please find below a copy of the groups final video:

And also an image of the winning team from the competition we took part in for the Oddbox project.