I generally asked the same few questions during my interviews and delved deeper into a topic based on each interviewee. The questions I asked were: "How old are your children and what are some of his or her favorite snacks?"
"What makes those snacks their favorite? Is there a story behind them?"
"Do you think about the nutritional value in snacks when grocery shopping?What factors do you go off of when buying snacks for your children?"
"How picky are your children when it comes time to buy snacks?"
"What's the most common time your children eats snacks and where?"
"Do your children ever have a hard time opening snacks? Have you yourself had any problems opening snacks?"
The first person I interviewed was Lee Ann, a professor who teaches a class that I'm currently taking. She has a 10 year old son along with older children and so I thought that fit perfectly with the demographic I was looking for. She's an experienced mother that's also taking on the job of being a college professor which isn't easy. On the topic of how healthy of a snack do you purchase for your son, she said "One of his favorite snacks are actually apples! Honeycrisp to be exact." She has always kept the idea of healthy eating on her mind when deciding on what snacks to buy and that fruit was always high on the list. One thing she has trouble finding however are snacks that fill the vegetables group. "My son doesn't eat enough vegetables and I can understand that. Vegetables aren't sweet nor are they salty and fatty. And when I think of vegetable snacks, the only thing that comes into my mind are raw vegetables with ranch. Ranch and other dips are loaded with fat and sugar so in the end it's not all that healthy of a snack."
The second person I interviewed is Michael, a friend of a friend. He's a single father with a 6 year old daughter which fits with the demographic and brings the unique perspective of raising a child by himself. His daughter's favorite snack are strawberry flavored fruit snacks. "I know that fruit snacks have very little fruit in them, but I like to eat them too which is probably why she likes them as well." This led to if he thought about nutritional value when it came to snacks and a good piece of information he said was "I saw these veggie straws and thought that they might be a good snack for Natalie because they have vegetables in them and they advertise all sorts of good stuff on the bag. Nope! Turns out it's still mainly potato based and the nutrient values are very low. This got me thinking that there weren't any good vegetable snacks out on the market. Looks like for now I'm stuck trying to get Natalie to eat real vegetables which is the healthiest option, but not the tastiest." Another factor is cost. "I'm a college student, I need to manage my money carefully so sometimes I can't buy the snacks that Natalie wants. Fruit snacks are a whole lot cheaper than real strawberries. Not just the initial price difference, but also buying ziploc bags and how long they keep for are some other costs."
The third person I interviewed is Alex, a student at the U and she's studying elementary education in the hopes to become a teacher. In her academic plan she has to go to public schools and work with kids for a couple hours every week. This meant that I changed the questions from being possessive to talking about other children and what she observed about snack time. On the topic of snack time she recalled a story of when a girl opened a bag of Cheez-it's and the crackers were crushed into little pieces. "I felt sorry for her, but couldn't really do anything about it except figure out if it was intentionally done by another student or if it was an accident." I asked if a similar situation has ever happened to her before and she exclaimed "All the time! Chips always end up broken when put into ziploc bags and it's cheaper to buy big bags rather than the individually sized ones. I've tried plastic boxes before which works in protecting food, but then they don't fit well inside my backpack and they also need to be washed."
Observation
For the observation, I went to an Aldi over the weekend. If you've never been to Aldi before, it's very easy to observe families because the snacks aisle is always at the beginning of the store. Right when you walk in the snacks aisle begins. I was curious to see which snacks a parent would choose when their children were next to them. One boy pointed out a snack and the mother took the snack without examining the box at all. The snack was a box of cupcakes. Another thing is that almost every product of Aldi is there own brand so they were the generic version of well known snacks. These were the Aldi equivalent of Hostess snacks. I was hoping to hear if a child wanted the name brand version of the snack or if they were fine with generic. I saw another parent with a child, but the mom cruised right past all the snacks to pick up what appeared to be more vital groceries such as milk, eggs, and chicken.
Experience
My experience was to be a shopper at Aldi and try to think like a parent when deciding what snacks to buy. There's a big variety of snacks for customers to choose from, but from what I could observe only a handful could be considered healthy. Many of the snacks were chips, cookies, and sweets. I quickly realized that since these are all Aldi products, the advertising isn't really there. The boxes and containers were all boring and didn't have any eye catching images on them. The only picture is of the product. The one exception is that the sugary children's cereals had cartoon characters on them with the characters mimicking well known cereal mascots such as a pirate for Kid's Crunch which of course is supposed to be Cap'n Crunch. I felt that maybe some parents don't stop at the snack aisle at all because nothing really catches their eye and they go on to buy whatever is on the grocery list.
Major Insights
- Parents want healthy snacks for their children, but they know they aren't as delicious as the unhealthy ones. (Interviews)
- Some parents would take any snack their child would ask for showing that children influence parents greatly. (Observations)
- Children like sweet snacks the most, be it fruit, chocolate, or cereal. (Interviews)
- Taste is top priority when choosing snacks. (Interviews)
- There aren't any healthy and tasty vegetable snacks on the market. (Interviews)
- Some parents when grocery shopping, don't pay any attention to snacks. (Observations)
- Packaging could be better in protecting snacks, especially once opened and the air can't protect the snack anymore. (Interviews)
- What's on the packaging is an important factor as to whether it's purchased or not. (Experience/Interviews)
- Reusable containers protect snacks, but have many cons such as size. (Interviews)
- Unhealthy snacks are a lot cheaper than healthy snacks which creates conflict when making purchasing decisions. (Interviews)
Problem Statements
Lee Ann needs a way for vegetables to be healthily incorporated into more snacks because raw vegetables with ranch dip isn't a healthy enough option.
Michael needs a way for vegetables to be more appealing to kids because the current vegetable snacks available aren't as tasty as the sugar or salt loaded snacks and "veggie" chips aren't really healthy at all.
Alex needs a way to keep snacks safe because snacks are susceptible to being broken when inside thin plastic baggies and plastic containers are too bulky to fit into backpacks easily.