Fruit Buddi

Website

http://fruitbuddi.com/

Describe yourself, your project and how you’ll pull it off.

How can we make food more awesome? By making fruits and vegetables more awesome! Fruit Buddi is an interactive, educational shopping bag that uses matching to engage kids and their parents with the produce section in grocery stores-- it hangs on the shopping cart and allows kids access to its red, yellow, green, and blue produce compartments. Fruit Buddi was created based on 3 key insights: children are more likely to eat the food they help pick out, children love to fill things up, and matching is a simple and interactive game children understand and enjoy. That being said, FOR KIDS, the Fruit Buddi provides a fun and welcomed activity while shopping with their parents. By giving them a relevant objective, like getting more green apples, the Fruit Buddi gets kids actively involved and provides them a sense of ownership over the fruits they help pick out. FOR PARENTS, the Fruit Buddi makes for a less stressful shopping experience because their kids are given something to do. And because the Fruit Buddi is attached to the cart, parents have greater control over where their kids shop and what they shop for. We are on a mission to improve the family shopping experience, to encourage children to eat more fruits and vegetables, and to reduce childhood obesity. We will do this by selling the Fruit Buddi directly to parents since they are most invested in their children’s health.

The Specifics

We will apply the $1,000 grant toward manufacturing costs— we’ve been working on Fruit Buddi’s design (testing, iterating and prototyping) for a year in conjunction with a handful of users, and we are now at the point where we need to start production on a larger scale. With this $1,000, we will be able to fund the production of 200 Fruit Buddi’s, which we will give to families in the Chicago area. These giveaways will allow us to receive crucial feedback from hundreds of kids and parents, as well as prove its market value—getting Fruit Buddi into the hands of our users will help move it towards our ultimate goal of offering it within stores for free.

Discussion

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