Philips: green Kitchen Innovation
Role: User journey mapping, research, and competitive benchmarking
Team: 1 Industrial Designer, 2 Engineers
Timeline: 2.5 Months
Client: Philips
Impact: Concepts presented to Philips Design Director as part of an industry brief at Politecnico di Milano.
Preparing food at home is a need and a challenge. Countertop and storage space are precious — yet the average kitchen generates enormous food waste with no system to close the loop.
As the experience designer on this project, I mapped the full home gardening and food preparation journey to find where the biggest opportunity lived. That research pointed to one clear gap: food waste. The result was a circular food and compost processor designed to close the full cycle.
brief meeting
research
Philips came to us with a clear goal: become the leader in multifunctional kitchen tools. The challenge was designing something that could handle every food-related task across the home journey, without compromise.
Live brief session with the Philips design director,
We started broad, mapping how people prepare food, store kitchen tools, and consume food across the home journey. Three themes kept surfacing: food waste, homegrown produce, and plant-based diets.
The data backed it up. Food waste results in $1.5 trillion in losses and 1.3 billion tons of edible food wasted annually, with the livestock industry making it worse. Meanwhile plant-based food sales grew 54% over three years, and consumers are increasingly interested in knowing where their food comes from and how it impacts the environment.
To go deeper, we interviewed people already practicing homegrown food journeys. Two things kept coming up: monitoring plants is hard, and cleaning produce after harvesting is messy. People also felt guilty throwing out food that was only slightly damaged.
opportunity
At this point we had a clear picture of the problem space but no defined product direction. As the experience designer on the team, I took initiative to map the full user journey — from garden preparation to harvesting to food preparation — to understand the process, pain points, and tools involved at each stage.
The journey map helped us narrow our focus. We wanted to tackle one of the largest food problems in the world: food waste. Composting emerged as the key opportunity — turning food waste back into fertiliser to feed the same produce you started with. The journey map gave us a shared framework to decide exactly where our product could make the biggest contribution to users, to Philips, and to the environment.
product benchmark
Our journey map and research pointed us toward one clear opportunity: a product that could close the full food cycle.
We brainstormed several product scenarios before committing to a direction. I created sketches, then collaborated with the engineers to surface their concerns and identify which mechanisms were feasible.
To understand the market, I benchmarked existing multifunctional food processors and food compost cyclers, mapping their features, mechanics, and composting methods.
The benchmarking confirmed we were on the right track. No other company had combined food processing and composting into a single home product. This was Philips' opportunity to lead a new market category.
The touchpoints we target to tackle
SOLUTION
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
The home gardening Journey
Benchmark of food compost cycler
tHE resultS
Benchmark of food processor
We designed a multifunctional food and compost processor that closes the full food cycle, from washing and chopping homegrown produce to composting waste and returning it to your garden as fertiliser.
To minimize new mold and production development costs, we built on the existing Philips Viva Collection Food Processor, adding a cleaning produce accessory and a compost processor.
The result encourages a homegrown food cycle, promotes green growth, and tackles food waste through effective composting — all in one product that fits on your counter.
Reflection
Learned:
In this project, engineers solved constraints, industrial designers thought in form, and I stayed anchored in the user. Together we narrowed down what mattered most and brought it to life with real components and specifications. Collaborating across disciplines to create something tangible was just as exciting as designing a service or digital experience.
Working across four nationalities brought different lived experiences and perspectives into the research. Being open to those differences made our insights richer.
What I'd do differently:
Push form exploration further
Thinking forward:
The onboarding experience for first-time composters is the biggest untapped opportunity. How do we make an unfamiliar behavior feel approachable from day one?