Smart pantry app helping users prevent waste with alerts and recipes
Creating for environmental impact
Background
Food waste is a significant global issue — more than $29 billion worth of safe and edible food is discarded by consumers each year due to confusion over date labels, and 40% of food in the US is wasted annually, amounting to approximately $218 billion in losses. Savr was built to address this directly — giving users the tools to stay on top of their pantry, reduce unnecessary waste, and make more mindful consumption decisions.
Role
Product Designer
Team
4 Designers
PROJECT SUMMARY
Savr is a mobile app designed to reduce food waste by tracking items in a digital pantry and notifying users of upcoming expiration dates. The project was pitched at the CSUF Design-a-thon, where the team won 1st place overall.
Key Insights and Objectives
Food waste is largely an awareness problem. Users weren't intentionally wasting food — they were simply forgetting what they had. A timely notification system was one of the most impactful solutions the team could design.Users wanted guidance, not instructions. Competitive analysis revealed that existing platforms told users what to do rather than giving them options. Savr prioritized giving users the ability to weigh their choices — particularly around recipes — rather than prescribing a single path.Personalization was a meaningful differentiator. With dietary preferences and eating habits becoming increasingly important, building recipe filtering around individual needs made the app more inclusive and relevant to a wider audience.Simplicity was essential. A minimalist design approach wasn't just an aesthetic choice — it was a functional one, ensuring the app felt approachable and easy to use for an audience that needed a frictionless experience to build new habits around food management.
SYMPATHIZE
Research
The team conducted research through surveys and interviews to better understand users' relationships with food management and waste. The findings painted a clear picture: users regularly forgot what food they had at home, felt overwhelmed by expiration date confusion, and wanted more than just a tracking tool — they wanted suggestions for what to do with the food they already had. Broader data reinforced the scale of the problem, with over $29 billion in edible food discarded annually and 1 in 3 households reporting waste due to poor planning. This combination of personal pain points and systemic impact gave the team a strong foundation to design from.
DEFINE
Research Insights
Three key insights emerged from the research.
Users consistently said that reminders about expiration dates would be helpful — the awareness gap was real and addressable through timely notifications.
Users frequently forgot what food they already had in their fridge or pantry, pointing to the need for a simple, accessible digital inventory.
Users expressed a desire for recipe suggestions and sustainable storage tips — they didn't just want to be told their food was expiring, they wanted actionable ideas for using it up. Together, these insights shaped Savr's core feature set: a digital pantry, expiration alerts, and a recipe recommendation engine.
User Persona
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Affinity Mapping
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With research findings in hand, the team synthesized their insights and competitive analysis to identify the core gaps in the market. Existing platforms focused narrowly on expiration tracking without offering recipe support or meaningful personalization — leaving users with information but no clear next step. The team mapped their ideas around three opportunity areas: improving food awareness through alerts, helping users act on what they have through recipes, and making the experience feel personal through dietary and preference-based filtering. This synthesis gave the team a clear direction and a focused feature set to move into ideation with.
"How might we design a simple, intuitive app that helps users track their pantry, reduce food waste, and make the most of the ingredients they already have?"
This question anchored every design decision throughout the project. It pushed the team to balance functionality with simplicity — building a tool that was genuinely useful without overwhelming users with complexity. The three pillars of the answer were clear from the research: awareness through expiration alerts, action through recipe recommendations, and accessibility through a clean and approachable design. Every feature built into Savr traced back to one of these three pillars.
IDEATE
Sketching Ideas
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Moving into low-fidelity, the team sketched out the key screens and flows to visualize the structure of the app before committing to any design decisions. This stage helped the team finalize the two core feature areas they wanted to prioritize: scan and input, ensuring users could add items to their pantry either by scanning grocery receipts or manually entering them, and pantry and recipe, allowing users to view their inventory sorted by expiration date and discover recipes that used items nearing spoilage. Sketching allowed the team to quickly explore layout options and user flows, moving fast within the constraints of the design-a-thon format.
Breaking Down Features
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Competitive analysis played a key role in shaping the team's feature decisions. Existing platforms were largely limited to expiration date tracking with little beyond that, leaving significant gaps around recipe recommendations, personalization, and user agency. The team evaluated features against both user needs and what competitors lacked, prioritizing receipt and barcode scanning for easy onboarding, pantry inventory with expiration sorting, recipe suggestions filtered by available ingredients and dietary preferences, expiration notifications, and a profile with savings statistics and scan history. The feature matrix helped the team stay focused and avoid scope creep within the tight sprint timeline.
PROTOTYPE
User Flow
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The information architecture was mapped out to ensure the app had an efficient and consistent flow that surfaced all of the main features clearly. After onboarding — which included scanning a grocery receipt or manually selecting ingredients and setting up notifications — users land on their pantry page, where items are displayed and sorted by expiration date. From the pantry, users can navigate to recipe recommendations filtered by their available ingredients, browse and save recipes to their own page, or manage their profile where savings statistics and scan history are stored. The user flow was designed to be as frictionless as possible, with multiple entry points for adding items and clear pathways between the app's core features.
Mid-Fidelity
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The mid-fidelity stage brought the team's key features to life in structured wireframes. Three main flows were developed and refined during this phase. The recipe finder allowed users to filter recommendations based on pantry items and dietary preferences, with items nearing expiration prioritized at the top to encourage timely use. The pantry input flow offered multiple methods for adding items — manual entry, barcode scanning, or receipt scanning — reducing friction during onboarding and giving users flexibility in how they set up and maintain their inventory. The expiration alert system was also fleshed out during this stage, defining how and when notifications would reach users to give them enough time to act before items spoiled. Together, these mid-fidelity flows established the functional foundation of the final product.
Branding
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The design system for Savr was built around a minimalist approach, chosen to create a clean and intuitive experience that felt simple and approachable for the target audience. Green served as the primary color, chosen deliberately to evoke freshness, food, sustainability, and mindful consumption — visually reinforcing the app's core mission at every turn. The typography system used three distinct typeface families, each with a defined role, creating a clear and accessible hierarchy that guided users through the interface. Bold, impactful headings balanced with readable body text ensured that information was easy to scan and engage with. A suite of reusable components was built on top of this typographic and color foundation, ensuring consistency across all screens and making the design system scalable for future development.
TEST
User Testing
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Given the design-a-thon sprint format, user testing was conducted within tight time constraints. The team focused on evaluating the core flows — onboarding, pantry management, recipe discovery, and expiration alerts — to ensure they were intuitive and easy to navigate. Feedback from testing reinforced that users responded positively to the flexibility of the input options and the clarity of the expiration-sorted pantry view. The recipe filter was highlighted as a particularly useful feature, giving users a meaningful way to act on their inventory rather than simply being informed about it. Any friction points identified during testing were addressed in the final iteration before the pitch.
FINAL AND PRESENTATION
INTRODUCING: savr
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The final prototype for Savr brought together the complete design system into a polished, cohesive mobile app experience. Onboarding guided users through scanning a grocery receipt or manually selecting ingredients, with notification setup built in from the start. The pantry page displayed all items with an inventory index and estimated expiration dates, with clear options to add, remove, and filter. The recipe section surfaced personalized recommendations sorted by urgency, with filtering by food type and dietary requirements. The profile page rounded out the experience with savings statistics, grocery list history, and past scan records — giving users a reflective view of their impact over time. The final design was clean, intuitive, and purpose-driven, reflecting both the team's research insights and the broader mission of reducing food waste.
Presentation
The team presented Savr at the CSUF Design-a-thon, delivering their pitch and walking judges through the full design process — from research and competitive analysis to the final prototype. The presentation communicated not just the product itself but the problem it was solving and the thoughtfulness behind every design decision. The team's work was recognized with 1st place overall, validating both the strength of the concept and the quality of the execution under a tight sprint timeline.
REFLECTION
Key Takeaways
Savr was as much a lesson in speed and collaboration as it was in design. Working within the constraints of a design-a-thon pushed the team to prioritize efficiently, make faster decisions, and streamline their process without sacrificing quality. It also strengthened their ability to integrate different perspectives into a cohesive, user-centered solution — merging ideas collaboratively rather than working in silos. Beyond the design skills, the project deepened the team's awareness of food waste as a systemic issue, reinforcing that good design can contribute to meaningful real-world impact. The experience made clear that solving a user problem and contributing to a broader environmental mission don't have to be separate goals — when the research is strong and the design is intentional, they can be one and the same.
Next Steps
Looking ahead, Savr has significant opportunity to expand beyond its core food tracking functionality to create deeper user engagement and long-term value. On the product side, the team would look to refine the recommendation algorithm to deliver more personalized recipe suggestions based on individual dietary preferences, eating habits, and past behavior. Social and community features could also be introduced — allowing users to share recipes, tips for sustainable food storage, and savings milestones with others — turning Savr from a personal tool into a community-driven platform around mindful consumption. Further development of the scanning feature would also be a priority, improving accuracy across a wider range of barcodes, receipts, and producing items to reduce manual input and lower the barrier to onboarding. From a business perspective, the team identified opportunities to explore partnerships with grocery retailers and food brands, as well as a potential premium tier offering advanced analytics, meal planning tools, and expanded recipe libraries. Most importantly, continued usability testing with a broader and more diverse user base would be essential to validating the design decisions made during the sprint and identifying new areas of friction or opportunity that only surface with real-world use.