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we believe people have a fundamental right to eat healthy without having to spend their entire lives thinking about eating healthy.Of course, the world doesn’t function like this. We all know how hard it is to change our eating habits, and yet we just accept that as the cost of eating well. For whatever reason, we are completely fine with the idea that eating healthy food is supposed to be a huge pain in the ass and requires a massive up-front investment of time, energy, and money. What if we could simplify the entire experience of buying food so you could buy healthy, genuinely home-cooked meals on impulse, without any pre-planning?

Making stores smaller is the single most significant change that could be made to food retail to help people improve their eating habits. Hav-ing small stores means they can be accessed easily as part of daily rouine, and as a result people can keep their kitchens stocked with fresh ingredients more often. Unfortunately, it’s more profitable for tradi-tional retailers to keep stores large and far apart from one another, and most of them continue to do exactly that by closing down smaller stores that are closer to home and opening up larger stores that are farther away. If we want to make fresh food more accessible for people, we need to fundamentally change how we think about buying food.

Creating a retail experience that helps enable people to eat healthy requires a foundational re-thinking of

how food is sold.

1. change standardsWe need to figure out what eating healthy means & our stan-dards need to change as a result, and the only way for us to do this is by talking to friends and family and doing a whole lot of book research. If we don’t even hang out with people who are really into healthy eating, then it’s much more difficult for us to find the right resources to help us sort through the huge glut of information.

2. mental gymnasticsWe’re constantly examining our pantry and doing mental gym-nastics to try and figure out what items have to go with what other items to create which meals. This effort is so clumsy that we need to externalize it by writing our purchasing decisions down in a grocery list (something we don’t really do for any other type of shopping).

3. inconvenienceAs stores are becoming farther and farther away from one another, our transit options to stores are getting more and more restricted. We are also taking trips less often than we used to, which reduces the quality of the food we’re eating by forcing us to buy long-lasting, non-perishable processed food items instead of fresh ingredients.

if we want to eat better,

right now, we have to...

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4. info overloadWhen we walk into a grocery store, it’s huge! Sometimes it’s nice to have all of these options, but the rest of the time it makes it difficult to find things. More importantly, because we’re so overloaded with information inside the store we never have the time to pay enough attention to notice new things we’ve never tried before.

5. option overloadThis applies at the shelf level as well. Product facings and promo-tions give us way more choices than we really need. The huge number of options is incredibly intimidating and creates a mas-sive time incentive to keep buy-ing the same items. Who wants to spend their precious evening at a supermarket painstakingly weighing the pros and cons of each purchase decision?

6. just a warehouseAll of these things mean the mod-ern grocery store is functionally identical to a warehouse, where you need to walk in knowing exactly what you want and travel straight for those items in-store. This is incredibly important - it means that anyone trying to take control of their health has to go through a straight-jacket-wearing insane amount of pre-planning before they’re even in the store. There has to be an easier way to buy food.

right now, we have to...

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What’s a meal kit?The meal kit simplifies the exhausting process of planning a new meal by packaging expert-curated meals together in pre-portioned kits that people take home to cook within the next day or so. This eliminates the excruciating browsing and planning process, enabling people to try new home-cooked meals on impulse, just like they would try something new at a restaurant.

On any given day the store will sell anywhere between four and eight different meal kits, representing a variety of main courses and side dishes in both meat and veggie options. The kits are categorized by how long it takes to prepare them (30, 60, or 90 minutes), and the kits offered change daily to give customers a wide variety of options over time.

The whole kit is wrapped up in a simple square of paper or light cloth for transit home. (The simple packaging means the kits can be quickly assembled by employees in-store). The top is clipped shut by a recipe tag (above) which identifies the dish, time of preparation, and includes preparation instructions. Customers can rip the card off of the clip via a perforated edge and save it if they wish to prepare the meal again later on. Over time, the preparation of these meal kits helps customers expand their repretoire of meals.

A meal kit is a collection of whole ingredients packaged together to make a meal or dish, which

enables people to try new meals without time-consuming pre-planning.

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What’s a “pop-down” shop?The pop-down shop is a new kind of store that is small enough to be prefabricated, moved to a location and “popped down” in areas too small for normal stores, such as parking spaces, parks, shopping malls, metro stations, or corporate campuses. The store is built into a standard 40’ shipping container so that it can be easily be moved around using existing shipping infrastructure and fit into standard parking spaces.

Because the stores are so small, it means a given urban area can sup-port a lot of stores, which means they can be located all over in places where people will pass them on a daily basis, and as a result, visting the store can become a part of people’s daily routines. This doesn’t require people to make any additional conscious effort to change their shopping habits and, by combining this with the meal kits, means that customers can now buy healthy meals on impulse.

This gives people the ability to take control of their health and experi-ment with cooking new meals without stress or consequence, and without our nutrition getting in the way of more enjoyable activities all of us would rather be doing.

The pop-down shop is an ultrasmall store that can be moved to places people pass by on a daily basis, engaging with their routines and allowing them to

buy fresh food more frequently.

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who uses artichoke?ARTICHOKE is for people who -

1.Want to live healthier.

2. Hate having to settle for eating less-than-healthy food because it’s less

expensive or more convenient.

3. Have an appreciation for good food and aren’t averse to trying new and

adventurous things.

4. Find other parts of their lives constantly getting in the way of their

nutrition and well-being. (Or, perhaps, finding their nutrition and well-being constantly getting in the way of other parts of their lives!)

Why would these people want to buy their food from artichoke?

A.They like the simplicity of the meal kit, but they cant buy meal kits from traditional supermarkets because they only go once every two

weeks, and what’s the value of the meal kit if they’re only buying one once every fourteen days?

B.They like the convenience of a small store, but if the store doesn’t sell meal kits it can’t be their primary store because there’s always some-

thing the small store doesn’t have that they could easily get from [insert big box food retailer here].

15an artichoke street-side grocery store in its natural habitat

image credits

Page 2:Top: Mitchell Ave. Kroger, Cincinnati (Bing Maps)Bottom: Diptych 99 cent store II (Andreas Gursky)

Page 121. http://www.womensdish.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/women-walking.jpg2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/skessler/1564579773/4. Stock Photo (www.sxc.hu)