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.
Our application project relies on certain assumptions that we have yet to test and that may affect the viability of our application.
First, we assume that there are students who do not have the time to cook but want to eat healthier and have an ecological consciousness. We think that these students will be willing to pay for other students to cook for them because it will make them save on time and energy. However, we cannot be sure that the students will find the offer attractive enough since it requires to manage their time to get the meal from the cook, and then transport it, which can be more complicated than just buying a sandwich from a store.
Secondly, we consider that there are students that like cooking and are willing to do it for others, in exchange of a financial compensation. This assumption relies on the fact that, when a student takes the time to cook, increasing the volume of the meal does not pose a real problem in terms of time. As long as the cost increase is at least compensated by the price of the sold meal, the application should be attractive for cooks. However, we are aware of the fact that it also requires better time management and organization since the cook and his “client” will still need to meet to provide the meal, which needs organization.
There is also the risk that the cook or the student consumer do not meet their obligations. If the cook does not bring the food, or if the student consumer does not come to take the food they ordered (which is less likely since they will already have paid), they will lose trust in the application. To prevent this issue, we will put in place a system in which, if a cook or a consumer does not meet their obligation more than two times, they will be banned from the application.
Thirdly, we think the application will help resolve an ecological challenge. This ecological dimension is more difficult to assure. Students’ food habits are not always oriented towards healthy food and this may be a challenge. Our application will not have the role of choosing the users’ food consumption, but it might be able to progressively raise their awareness. By having multiple options at a relatively cheap price, they may test different types of food including healthy, vegetarian or organic ones, and they may change their habits in this sense.
To measure the scale of these risks and to assess if our application project is viable, we will create an online survey, that we will share on Sciences Po related Facebook groups, to obtain data on:
We also face some main challenges in terms of business opportunities and competition. There will be a competition with the CROUS and other food offers on the value provided by our application. The CROUS, which is already present at Sciences Po and has a good quality/price ratio, might not leave a lot of place for our proposition. Nevertheless, we believe that our application also provides a social link between the cook and the student consumer that the CROUS does not intend to provide. We also have many services related to the application (recipes, online payment, more varied food choice) that should make it attractive.
The type of food that we’ll provide might be challenging because it has a real importance considering the ecological dimension that we want our application to have. We assume that some students will cook and order vegan, vegetarian, organic or even fair trade ingredients based meals. This can be challenging considering the cost of these ingredients. We plan on providing more incentives than financial ones to cooks because we also want our application to create a social link between Sciences Po students. However, we are afraid that the cooks and consumers might not actually communicate and build a real bond, which might undermine the positive social effect that we intend our application to have.