Modernising the Local Food Market:

Abstract

In the past few decades, supermarkets and online grocery alternatives have been chipping away at the revenue of small local stores. This trend has only accelerated during the corona pandemic of 2020. Right now, the online grocery sector is the fastest-growing e-commerce sector in the world. At the same time, there is a trend in shorter food chains. The past few years have been particularly good for small alternatives of locally produced food. Companies like Boerschappen' and 'Support Your Locals' have been growing explosively in 2020. These companies try to sell products directly from the farmers to the customers.
Local Heroes (LH) is a start-up located in Amsterdam that intends to exploit this growing market of locally produced food to the advantage of local speciality stores. By providing small stores with an online platform to sell their products they want to make them more resistant to the growing online supermarkets. And by including initiatives of shorter food chains they try to keep the customers close to where the food comes from. To achieve this goal, LH uses an app and a mobile distribution centre (DC). This DC is located on the outskirt of a local daily food market. Customer order food from various vendors located in the neighbourhood via the app. LH then collects all the products at the DC and distributes them to the customer. The DC also functions as a pick-up point for people in the neighbourhood. LH wants to expand its business to other markets in Amsterdam, and possibly the Netherlands. For this to happen they need a DC which they can put anywhere to start operations. This graduation project describes the design process of this mobile DC. Firstly, the analysis of the current DC is described. From this research came several focus areas regarding product flow, customer contact and ergonomics. By incorporating the wishes of the employees and by working at the DC myself improvements were made to the existing DC. Thanks to close relations with the production company (InnovaN) it was possible to build and test ideas in the real world. This ensured a well thought out design was possible for the final product. The final product is the result of an evolutionary design approach. By learning about the pros and cons of certain ideas in real-world operations, designs were altered and improved. The final design improves product flow within the operations and increases efficiency by removing unnecessary steps in the process. The entire DC has also been decreased in size to increase the placement options for LH. These design choices ensure LH can continue to grow to other markets. Enabling them to help local speciality stores in their struggle against online competitors.