From June 27-29, Food+Tech Connect, in partnership with Applegate, Google, Chipotle, Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group and Studio Industries, is bringing restaurant, foodservice, tech and design rabble-rousers together to prototype open-source software and hardware solutions to industry-wide challenges at Hack//Dining NYC.

Earlier this week, we announced Google’s corporate wellness challenge, and today we’re excited to announce Chipotle’s sustainable restaurant design and operations challenge. Check out the challenge brief below for a deep dive into the issues, and please share questions, ideas and suggestions for relevant datasets in the comments.

Are you a developer, designer or data geek interested in green building, restaurant operations and big data? Snag your spot to Hack//Dining NYC today.

 Interested in having your API featured at Hack//Dining NYC? Email danielle [at] foodtechconnect [dot] com to learn about API partnership opportunities.

The Challenge

How might we use technology to help quick service restaurants measure the
environmental sustainability of how their stores are designed, built, and
operated?

About This Challenge

The way in which a quick-service restaurant (QSR) is designed and operated greatly determines the level of environmental sustainability it can achieve. Every design decision and action designers, staff and customers make has an impact on sustainability factors, such as energy use, carbon footprint, food waste and materials use, to name a few.

Large QSR chains present a great opportunity to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviors at scale. In order for QSRs to abide by more environmentally sustainable restaurant design and operational behaviors, there first must be an understanding of the environmental impact that any given design or operational action has.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and this challenge focuses on finding ways to measure and visualize the dimensions of sustainability for the staff, customers and designers of QSRs. Additionally, environmental impact data should be communicated in a way that is timely, actionable and fits within the context of the user’s experience.

Dimensions of Sustainable Restaurant Design

There are many dimensions by which one can measure environmental sustainability. The following list are a few key dimensions that we encourage you to focus on, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. As you interview subject matter experts related to this challenge, you may discover additional dimensions to integrate into your solutions:

Space Design: The many design decisions that go into the creation of a QSR location can have
a huge impact on sustainability. Factors such as store architecture & layout, customer experience,
and building materials all have impacts on the environmental footprint of a QSR location. Thought
starters on how space design can impact sustainability include:

• Architecture & Layout: How does the availability of natural light impact the amount of light & heat energy required to operate a location? How can you reduce construction time and energy by retaining existing architectural elements of a building?
• Customer Experience: How does the layout of a store affect how customers behave? How does store layout affect throughput and operating efficiency?
• Building Materials: What impact do certain materials have on energy costs? Are building materials responsibly chosen and sourced?

Energy Use: How efficiently the space uses basic energy resources such as gas and electricity. Consider the full range of energy spent to directly operate the space (e.g., cooking gas, electricity, etc.) and to power the services that support the space externally (e.g., fuel for the trucks delivering supplies).

Food & Material Sourcing: The type and source of food and materials used in a restaurant has an enormous impact on environmental sustainability. Factors such as organic vs conventional, processed vs raw, local vs non-local, and renewable vs vs non-renewable should be considered in assessing the goods consumed by a QSR location.

Food & Material Waste: A food or material could be sustainably chosen and sourced, but we must also ensure that those goods are used in a way that’s most efficient. Waste is an obvious detriment to both the business and the environment and should be actively managed.

Operational Throughput & Efficiency: For any system, QSRs included, there is a level of operational volume where the system is operating most efficiently. Cars have them, factories have them, and restaurants have them as well. Maximizing operational throughput and efficiency requires achieving the right balance of inputs to outputs, which can be measured in many ways.

What’s At Stake

QSRs as a category consume a large amount of natural resources and there are many opportunities to make them more efficient. For example, 3.2 million tons of quick serve food packaging are used today, which includes nearly 39 billion pieces of disposable cutlery, more than 113 billion disposable cups and nearly 29 billion disposable plates. The restaurant industry also consumes 1/3 of all U.S. energy used by the retail sector. This energy is used to power food preparation appliances, sanitation, HVAC, lighting, kitchen ventilation, and refrigeration.

All of this resource consumption can be managed more effectively, but it begins with helping the people who design and operate QSRs to understand how their actions impact the dimensions of sustainability. Only then can begin to develop ways to change behavior and make QSRs more environmentally sustainable.

User Focus

The following three user groups have considerable impact on the sustainability of a QSR space:

Operating Staff: The operating staff arguably has the biggest impact on how sustainably run a space is. Staff not only ensure that food and service are delivered in a high quality, efficient manner, but they are the primary controllers of how energy, food and materials are used during operation. Staff members are also extremely busy and any additional feedback information should be delivered in a way that’s considerate of an optimal workflow.

Designers: Two of the biggest impacts a designer has on a restaurant is on the spatial layout and the building materials used in construction. Spatial layout can impact throughput and operating efficiency, while material choices have energy efficiency, sourcing, and resource renewability implications. It is a daunting task to continuously weight the multitude of sustainability implications that each design decision has on the environment. But empowering a designer with the tools to better understand these implications during the design process can have huge implications on how sustainable spaces are made.

Customers: The customer’s primary goal is to have an enjoyable food experience, which must remain a priority as any type of behavioral feedback (if any) is considered. However, there may be opportunities to identify and measure less sustainable consumption behaviors in the hopes of shifting them toward a higher level of sustainability. Feedback loops can be created that give customers tactful input on the environmental impacts of things like menu selections, packaging and flatware use, and energy and water use, to name a few.

Sample Questions

• What is the process of designing a new store location like?
• How well do you understand the impact of your design decisions on sustainability?
• Walk me through how you accomplish your primary job. At what points do you make a decision or action that impacts environmental sustainability?
• How mindful are you today about how your actions impact sustainability?
• What is your capacity to receive and digest additional information about what you’re doing?
• How flexible are you in changing the way you do things today?
• How is data recorded and reported back to you (if at all) regarding your actions?
• How do you get feedback on your performance and/or the impact of your actions on sustainability today?

Hacking Thought Starters

To hack this challenge, the following sub-provocations have been identified to get you started. These are by no means exhaustive and we encourage you to develop your own in the course of the challenge:

• How might we help restaurants more accurately monitor and manage their usage/waste levels in food, energy and materials?
• How might we use connected devices to collect and analyze data about how sustainably a restaurant runs?
• How might we make it easier to determine the overall environmental impact of specific building materials?
• How might we display real-time information back to users that enables them to calibrate how they act as they’re working?
• How might we introduce feedback loops to users in a way that doesn’t negatively disrupt the context of their current experience?

Interested in having your API featured at Hack//Dining NYC? Email danielle [at] foodtechconnect [dot] com to learn about API partnership opportunities.