Is The Food Industry Inclusive?

Angelo Kawakami, Innovation Manager, Panco

I am the front man of a rock band called “blind, deaf and crazy”, with a completely blind bass guitar, a deaf solo guitar (one of the guitar players). The others are supposedly the crazies but I confess that at this point of my life, I am little bit of everything

In these 12 years with the band I have learnt a lot about life. In one of our conversations with Ricardo, the blind one, I asked him about his process of buying foods and it was an interesting and rich conversation, so interesting that I scheduled a workshop in the company with executive board, marketing, HR, and R&D people. I´ll show some interesting points of our conversation, regarding food business.

Buying Process: normally they must ask for help to choose their products. There is no other way. Buying online is a very good tool but some of them still prefer to make a physical purchase, feel integrated, sense, and smell the product. Also there some hurdles as some sites are not so accessible with a lot of dynamic banners. There are some apps that vocalize what is written in the screen, too.

Consumption moment: They don´t have access to the product information and identification. Some products, in cartoon packs have braille identification with generic names. No flavor or fragrance is mentioned. Expiration date is also a challenge; it is not possible to control it, and this is a health issue.

"With development of AI, you can create a relationship with a product and brand with a real interaction, teaching nutrition and recipes"

Are the smartphones an extension of the brain and body? For them is a very good tool. Payments, programing electronic equipment are an easier task now. How about the product? How to connect an offline product to online? Using simple 2D code in the packaging connects the product to consumer.

Everybody can access much more than a beautiful design and simple description of the product. Also, it can help to traceability of the product as it has more than 100 fields of information, including expiring dates. Hence, this can help them control their product stock and identify expired products.

Imagine connecting an app that register the products and advises when they are expired? Also, with development of AI, you can create a relationship with a product and brand with a real interaction, teaching nutrition and recipes. There are a lot of blind people, who practice cooking as a hobby, consume “cooking books”, recipes and culinary shows. Christine Ha is the blind cook who won “Master Chef” with Gordon Ramsay. More accessible websites with accessibility options can help them; even videos with a good description would help a lot.

The “dream product” would be recognition through proximity, something like RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags. There are some readers that can be attached to a smartphone and, in a near future, it can be built in gadget but who knows the future?