The goal of this application is to link Sciences Po students who know how to cook and who like to cook with Sciences Po students who are fed up with eating fast food and who would like to eat a healthy meal at low cost.
In order to deploy our project, we will first start by creating the application, on which relies all our concept.
Once it is created, we will advertise it on the different Sciences Po student Facebook groups and pages, since they will be the first concerned. We will also create our own Instagram page, since it will allow us to deepen and strengthen our reach on the Sciences Po students’ community online, as well as benefiting from a cooler and trendier image, since teenagers and young adults nowadays use Instagram much more than Facebook: 41% of Instagram users across the world are between 16 and 24 years old1, whereas it is 27% for Facebook2. This should be effective to inform the students of our project and attract them. We also count a lot on the word of mouth since Sciences Po students are all part of a rather small community, which is easier to target than a larger scale. We will also put posters and communicate about our application directly on the Sciences Po campus.
We expect the application to gradually gain in popularity for some months. We plan to develop it through various services and events such as shared holiday meals for events like Christmas or the New Year. We will also propose punctual events like a “Secret chef show” in which a “personality” (a renowned chef, a teacher, a member of the administration, etc.) will cook for a student with some challenges, such as specific ingredients, only student material in a student kitchen, with a restricted student budget. The advertisement of these events will be mainly done through the application and its social media accounts.
Most of the costs will concern the creation of the application itself, since we do not have all the necessary skills to create it all by ourselves. However, we think those costs should not be too important since our application will be quite simple. We estimate this cost to be around 500 euros. As advertisement should not cost us anything, we should not have any other substantial costs during the first phases of the project launch. For any other services or events that we would want to develop, we will wait to see if our application is viable and attractive enough.
In order to cover those costs, we might take a small margin on the cost of the meal paid by the student consumer. After the cook has set his price, we could apply a margin of around 10-15% of the original price, which will define the final price proposed to the consumer. According to our projections, this should cover the initial cost of the application.
However, we would prefer to take the lowest margin possible because our concept mainly relies on the social objective of optimizing a student budget. Hence, if our sponsors and partners accept to cover the fees of the application, we will not take margins on the meals.
We do not expect to really benefit from the application or have important returns, what matters most is the deployment of our solution and to raise awareness among Sciences Po students about the impacts of what we eat, both on their health and on the environment.
In order to deploy our project and to cover the main investments required, we will appeal to some sponsors which might find our concept attractive and coherent with their activity.
First, we will contact some food markets such as Monoprix, Carrefour, Lidl, in which most of Sciences Po students buy their groceries. It could be beneficial to the stores because it would bring them clients (the cooks) and it makes sense for our application because it is based on food. We will also contact food stores specialized in organic products such as “Naturalia” or “Bio c’ bon” because we also expect some cooks to use organic products.
For our punctual events, we might partner with various Sciences Po students associations such as the Bureau des Elèves (BDE), the Bureau des Arts (BDA), the Bureau des Sports (BDS) or Sciences Po Environnement. They would help us communicate on our events and would share the potential costs.