IT’S A SOCIAL BUSINESS: MAPPING THE INFLUENCE OF MEAL … · Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology 2018 IT’S A SOCIAL BUSINESS: MAPPING THE INFLUENCE

School of Design

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of

Technology

2018

IT’S A SOCIAL BUSINESS: MAPPING THE

INFLUENCE OF MEAL KIT SERVICES IN USER

VALUE AND CO-CREATED EXPERIENCES

BRETT CAMILLERI

Bachelor of Industrial Design (Hons)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the

degree of Master of Philosophy

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Keywords Dinner

Value co-creation

Service dominant logic

Service design

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Abstract

The development of services has drastically increased in complexity, as service designers

must not only consider how the service functions, but where it exists within its customer’s

creation of value. This challenge is embodied by the meal kit service model, which aims to

address the modern difficulties associated with cooking dinner. It does so by attempting to

simplify its customers creation of dinner by preselecting a week’s work of meals, for which

it then organises the corresponding ingredients and cooking instructions that are delivered

to the customers door step. However, the service’s method of provision fails to also

accommodate the potential contextual, social and religious values its customers may

consider vital to their creation and consumption of dinner. And so, despite the service’s

convenient and healthy features, the strict method in which they are provided can

challenge their customers’ personal food values, ultimately negating any benefit attributed

to commercial entity. This culminates in the service design challenge where the meal kit

must consider how to balance the uniquely determined values its various customers may

attribute to dinner, while ensuring that its ability to do so remains viable at commercial

scales.

In response to this difficulty, this study grounds its scope around the exploration of existing

customer values attributed to dinner, and identifies how the meal kit service is currently

used in realising them. To frame this exploration, this study utilises a combination of

participatory design and service dominant logic concepts that explore the routine usage of

the meal kit service. This is because both concepts share the axiological perspective that

value can only be created by individual perceiving it. And despite using varied versions of

co-creation, both acknowledge that only the individual can create their own value, and so

they should be involved the development of the solutions.

Value’s intrinsic and contextually informed nature is used to inform the social constructivist

epistemology that underpins this study. This study utilises highly qualitative methods

informed by the participatory design discipline to explore the mundane and routine

processes of six households as they use the meal kit to create dinner through the week.

This generative approach enabled the collection of participant descriptions of their

routines, preferences and frustrations, in addition to their imagined futures and desired

goals.

The exploration of meal kit users’ mundane processes and subsequent analysis through

service dominant logic concepts presented a number of implications that can benefit the

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service design discipline. This informed a method that synthesises the unique processes of

meal kit customers into a comparable series of practices that are representative of the

value creation process. This method of abstracting of specific processes into practices

forms the basis by which a service designer can establish the expected degree of control

the customer wants over the value creation process, who else is involved in its creation,

and the overarching purpose of the activities performed. Combined, these three

dimensions present a means of characterising the various network roles and expected

functions attributed to the meal kit service by its users, the understanding of which can be

used by service designers to inform future service iterations that are more appropriate for

value creation.

Upon the application of this analytical tool, this study subsequently identified that

participants were already naturally adapting elements of the meal kit to align with their

contextually informed values. The exploration into these customer-led modifications to the

service informed the conclusion that the meal kit’s primary offering should be designed

with the intention of interacting with a number of immediate users peripheral to the

primary customer. This is because this study identifies that a service’s resiliency can be

improved by increasing the primary customer’s ability to seek help from both household

members and peers, and apply their efforts directly into the meal kit’s function. Apart from

problem resolution, this approach was also identified as a promising means of continually

innovating the meal kit in a way that was highly tailored to those using it. Both the

analytical method created, and the subsequent co-creative functions identified through it

can inform service designers how these natural evolutions of the service can be adopted by

the firm in future iterations. Consequently, this study is expected to contribute towards the

intersection of service science and its application through service design, and subsequently

ease the development of co-creative services that accommodate both the customer and

their surrounding network.

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Table of Contents

Keywords ................................................................................................................................. iii

Abstract ................................................................................................................................... iv

List of figures ........................................................................................................................... ix

List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... xi

Statement of Original Authorship .......................................................................................... xii

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... xiii

1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 15

1.1 Research purpose................................................................................................... 16

1.2 Research significance ............................................................................................. 17

1.3 Research scope and research questions ................................................................ 18

1.4 Thesis outline ......................................................................................................... 20

2. Literature review ............................................................................................................ 23

2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 23

2.2 The challenges of facilitating the modern Australian dinner through service ...... 24

2.2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 24

2.2.2 The servitisation of dinner and home cooking .............................................. 25

2.2.3 Measuring the benefit of meal kit service through a holistic perspective of food 28

2.2.4 The difficulties of competing within the Australian grocery market ............. 32

2.2.5 Defining the social attributes of food ............................................................ 34

2.2.6 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 37

2.3 Designing co-creative services ............................................................................... 39

2.3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 39

2.3.2 Service design and the meal kit ..................................................................... 40

2.3.3 The functional dynamics of value .................................................................. 42

2.3.4 The meal kit’s role in the creation of value ................................................... 46

2.3.5 Exploring food values through design ............................................................ 49

2.3.6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 52

2.4 Using practices to inform co-creation in networks ................................................ 54

2.4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 54

2.4.2 Practices ......................................................................................................... 55

2.4.3 The customer service experience practices (CSEP) framework ..................... 55

2.4.4 CSEP’s role in addressing the social dimensions of food security ................. 57

2.4.5 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 58

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2.5 Summary ............................................................................................................... 59

3. Research design and method ......................................................................................... 62

3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 62

3.2 Methodology and research design ........................................................................ 62

3.2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 62

3.2.2 Participatory design and the fuzzy front end ................................................. 63

3.2.3 Make tools ..................................................................................................... 64

3.2.4 The cognitive map .......................................................................................... 65

3.2.5 Summary ........................................................................................................ 66

3.3 Method .................................................................................................................. 68

3.3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 68

3.3.2 Online mind map and prompt deck ............................................................... 68

3.3.3 Cultural probe ................................................................................................ 70

3.3.4 The cognitive map .......................................................................................... 72

3.4 Instruments for analysis ......................................................................................... 77

3.4.1 Dataset 1: Mind map images and words ....................................................... 77

3.4.2 Dataset 2: The cognitive map ........................................................................ 78

4. Results ............................................................................................................................ 81

4.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 81

4.2 Planning .................................................................................................................. 83

4.2.1 Personally planning meals ............................................................................. 83

4.2.2 Utilising the meal kit to plan meals ................................................................ 85

4.2.3 Attitudes towards service’s meal selection ................................................... 85

4.2.4 Contextual factors that challenge service’s meal selection ........................... 88

4.3 Unpacking .............................................................................................................. 90

4.3.1 How is the meal kit delivered? ....................................................................... 90

4.3.2 How appropriate are the ingredients the meal kit selects? .......................... 94

4.3.3 How are personal ingredients organised? ..................................................... 95

4.4 Preparation ............................................................................................................ 98

4.4.1 Afternoon routines......................................................................................... 98

4.4.2 Determining who cooks in the household ................................................... 100

4.5 Cooking ................................................................................................................ 104

4.5.1 Cooking personal meals ............................................................................... 104

4.5.2 Cooking with the meal kit ............................................................................ 105

4.5.3 Modifying the meal kit ................................................................................. 107

4.6 Dinner ................................................................................................................... 108

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4.6.1 Regular dinner process ................................................................................ 109

4.6.2 Dinner with extended family and friends .................................................... 111

4.6.3 Convincing others to eat .............................................................................. 113

5. Findings ........................................................................................................................ 115

5.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 115

5.2 Co-creating value with the meal kit service ......................................................... 116

5.3 Changing household roles with the meal kit ....................................................... 120

5.4 Customer-driven modifications and when the service breaks ........................... 124

5.5 The evolution of the meal kit’s value proposition .............................................. 127

5.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 130

6. Discussion..................................................................................................................... 133

6.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 133

6.2 Measuring for the network role attributed to the meal kit service .................... 134

6.3 Customer-network-led co-creation of the meal kit ............................................. 137

6.4 Designing for value co-creation with the network .............................................. 140

6.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 144

7. Implications and conclusion ......................................................................................... 146

7.1 Theoretical implications ....................................................................................... 146

7.2 Managerial implications ....................................................................................... 147

7.3 Conclusions .......................................................................................................... 150

7.4 Limitations ............................................................................................................ 154

7.5 Future works ........................................................................................................ 155

8. References ................................................................................................................... 158

Appendices ........................................................................................................................... 166

8.1 Appendix A Examples of enlistment .................................................................... 166

8.2 Appendix B Initial trial of meal kit ........................................................................ 168

8.3 Appendix C Cognitive Map Development ............................................................ 169

8.4 Appendix D Cognitive Map Pilot Studies .............................................................. 170

8.5 Appendix E Coding scheme and development .................................................... 177

8.6 Appendix F Practice chain development .............................................................. 181

8.7 Appendix G Meal kit symbols ............................................................................... 185

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List of figures Figure 1 The FAO’s four pillars of food security (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015) ..................... 30

Figure 2 The elements of food security’s social dimension ................................................... 36

Figure 3 Ellway & Dean’s (2015) cyclical description of value creation ................................. 44

Figure 4 Customer service experience practices (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, and Ferrier,

2015) ...................................................................................................................................... 56

Figure 5 Mind map responses ................................................................................................ 70

Figure 6 Blank prompt cards in use during pilot study .......................................................... 70

Figure 7 Cultural probe Information ...................................................................................... 72

Figure 8 Setup of cognitive map exercise .............................................................................. 76

Figure 9 Completed cognitive map exercise .......................................................................... 77

Figure 10 Kimbell's (2014) AEIOU framework ....................................................................... 78

Figure 11 Example of printed activity cards used for affinity diagram .................................. 79

Figure 12 Affinity diagram for participants 6 and 7 ............................................................... 79

Figure 13 Practice chain structure ......................................................................................... 81

Figure 14 Participant household composition ....................................................................... 82

Figure 15 Participant 1’s response to service’s selection of meals. ...................................... 86

Figure 16 (Left) Participant 5 and yng5’s feelings towards meal variety. (Right) Participant 2

uses ‘healthy bowl’ image to describe meal kit’s dinner selection. ...................................... 86

Figure 17 Participant 2’s pictorial response when describing her attitudes towards meal kit

delivery ................................................................................................................................... 91

Figure 18 Participant 6’s cultural probe response to ‘Where is the meal kit delivered?’ ..... 92

Figure 19 Both participant 5’s (left) and participant 2’s (right) describe unpacking the meal

kit with the checklist icon. ..................................................................................................... 92

Figure 20 Participant 3 uses farmer to demonstrate organic perception towards produce . 94

Figure 21 Participant 6’s (Left) and participant 1’s (Middle) attitudes towards grocery

shopping, and participant 2’s (Right) elimination of grocery shopping ................................. 96

Figure 22 Participant 3’s grocery shopping process with farmers market vendors .............. 97

Figure 23 Participant 7 uses the "my sis rocks" card to describe Participant 6’s predominant

cooking activities .................................................................................................................. 101

Figure 24 Participant 2's description of her afternoon routine ........................................... 103

Figure 25 (from left to right) Participant 1, 2 and 6’s cultural probe response to “What is the

Food Service providing too much of?” ................................................................................ 108

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Figure 26 Participant 3’s (Left) cultural probe response to ‘What does a successful meal

look like?’ and participant 4’s (Right) usage of the conversation card in conjunction with

dinner images to describe his dinner process. .................................................................... 109

Figure 27 Participant 1’s (Left) and 2’s (Right) response to dinner activities. .................... 110

Figure 28 Participants 5 (left), 6 and 7’s (right) description of their dinner activities ......... 111

Figure 29 Participant 5's description of household dinner after a competition .................. 112

Figure 30 Participant 7 prefers to get dinner with friends. ................................................. 112

Figure 31 Planning meals through the meal kit service ....................................................... 116

Figure 32 The meal guardian role ........................................................................................ 119

Figure 33 Collaborative cooking ........................................................................................... 121

Figure 34 Dictating cooking roles ......................................................................................... 122

Figure 35 Managing excess ingredients ............................................................................... 125

Figure 36 Modifying meal kit portion sizes..........................................................................125

Figure 37 Managing meal kit packaging wastage ................................................................ 124

Figure 38 Managing an undesired service meal .................................................................. 125

Figure 39 Managing undesired service ingredients ............................................................. 126

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List of Abbreviations SDL Service Dominant Logic

VIU Value in use

VISC Value in social context

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Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature: QUT Verified Signature

Date: August 2018

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Acknowledgements

This thesis was only possible thanks to the amazing support of my family, friends and

colleagues. I am truly grateful to be surrounded by such an amazing group of people, and

want to express that your advice, critique and distraction throughout my candidature has

been integral for this finished work.

To all my supervisors (current and past), each of you have had such an impact on both my

thesis and my personal development. To Marianella Chamorro-Koc, Udo Gottlieb, Jaz Choi

and Ben Kraal, I would like to express a great appreciation for each of your contributions to

my thesis. Each of our interactions has left me feeling richer from the experience.

To Jaz and Ben, while I unfortunately did not get to finish working with you two, your early

guidance emboldened me to explore a topic that I love. The direction and opportunities

both of you have granted me have left me much stronger from this experience, and I have

both of you two to thank for expanding both my world view and personal ability.

To Udo, despite joining my team half way through, your help and knowledge has been

integral to my work. Both your professionalism and optimistic nature has proven critical to

not just the completion of this project, but for also getting me across that mental finish

line, and I cannot express how thankful I am for your patience and dedication.

To Marianella, I want to express a wholehearted appreciation for taking on my project in its

final moments despite your terrifying schedule. I am overwhelmingly thankful for your

dedication to my work, and your finishing contributions are what helped me produce a

work that I’m truly proud of; you were integral in making that happen.

To my parents, Michael and Fiona, I cannot thank you enough for the unwavering love you

have shown me throughout my journey. There is not a chance that I would have made it

this far both professionally or personally without the support and sacrifice you have shown

me throughout my life.

To my brother Aaron, for reminding me that there’s a life outside of the thesis and

providing me with some much-needed distractions through a game as simple as ‘find the

shin’.

To my partner Violet, for being my anchor to reality and pulling me out of my work. Your

kind words, confidence and companionship have motivated me throughout my thesis, and I

cannot say enough thanks for your unconditional patience and understanding.

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To my Nana Margaret, and Poppy Antony, your optimism and kind words have also helped

me keep afloat through both the good and bad times of my work.

I’d also like to extend thanks to all my participants for each sharing their personal values

and descriptions of with me. It was such an honour to be included in your processes, and

without your help, my work would not have been possible.

To my professional editor, Neil Conning, who provided copyediting and proofreading

services, according to the guidelines laid out in the university-endorsed national ‘Guidelines

for editing research theses’

To the Urban Informatics Lab, I want to express how grateful I am for being welcomed into

such a brilliant and exemplary group of people. I feel so fortunate to be able to share my

experiences with you guys, and I’m better for it after being exposed to everyone’s

perspectives and conversations have broadened my own perspectives and made me

greater for it. You guys are doing some incredible work, and I am inspired by you all.

Finally, I would like to thank my close friends for the escapism you have provided me over

the 2 years of work. The distractions and joy you have shared with me were essential to

my sanity, and was exactly what I needed to escape the words of meal kit and co-creation.

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1. Introduction The way in which services are designed has increased in complexity and scope as a broader

array of temporal and contextual factors of the customer must be understood (Patrício,

Gustafsson, & Fisk, 2018), which is made apparent when looking at the meal kit service

model. Unlike traditional grocers, this service merges the elements of meal planning and

dietary advice with the physical organisation and delivery of ingredients and corresponding

cooking instructions to the customers home. With these functions considered, the meal kit

service is representative of a servitised good (Nudurupati, Lascelles, Wright, & Yip, 2016)

aimed at resolving the time pressures, low cooking ability and poor diet currently

attributed with the difficulties of modern Australian dinners (Banwell, Broom, Davies, &

Dixon, 2012d). But despite these complex processes, an analysis of dietary literature

suggests that this is still not enough (Perry et al., 2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014). The act of

creating and consuming dinner is highly contextual, intrinsically determined and can be

representative of social engagements involving a variety of users associated with the

customer (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997; Daniels, Glorieux, Minnen, & van Tienoven, 2012;

Fischler, 1988; Mintz & Du Bois, 2002). This infers that despite the convenience afforded by

the meal kit’s selection and delivery of ingredients, its strict provision can challenge either

the customer’s or their network’s dietary, religious or social food requirements,

consequently mitigating any benefit attributed to the service. This demonstration of

dinner’s complexity suggests the service must be designed so that the requirements of

both customer and their household are accounted for. These difficulties experienced by the

meal kit service are representative of a larger challenge for service designers, who must

now consider how commercial services can be designed to align with the requirements of

their various customers and their affiliated networks.

When considering how to approach this problem, service design’s mutual relationship with

the service dominant logic (SDL) paradigm and its concept of value co-creation can be used

to identify a solution (Wetter-Edman, 2009; Kimbell, 2014; Vargo and Lusch, 2017). This is

because service dominant logic’s most recent amendment of value co-creation also

recognises the influence of network members over the individual’s creation of value (Vargo

& Lusch, 2016). As such, the paradigm concludes that services must be designed to align

with the activities already conducted by their customers’ existing network of friends,

family, peers and other commercial entities (Storbacka, Frow, Nenonen, & Payne, 2015;

Vargo & Lusch, 2016). While service scientists suggest that service iterations must be

designed to be adaptable, interchangeable and malleable (Barile, Lusch, Reynoso, Saviano,

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& Spohrer, 2016; Vargo et al., 2016), achieving this at a commercial scale is still not clear,

further exemplifying the difficulties associated when designing future services. But when

considering how to accommodate this complexity, service researchers suggest that

answers lie in the contextual analysis of how existing services are utilised to co-create value

by their customers in conjunction with their network (Barile et al., 2016; Vargo et al., 2016).

It is therefore feasible to consider that an exploration and analysis of the meal kit service

through service dominant logic’s most recent amendment of value co-creation (Vargo &

Lusch, 2016) and other related service theories could inform a framework that assists

service designers.

1.1 Research purpose This study aims to explore how the meal kit service is utilised by its customers and their

network to co-create value. In observing how the service is used to create dinner, the

customer processes can subsequently be abstracted though service science concepts can

inform the theoretical processes used when co-creating value with their network. When

determining which service functions will be explored in relation to its customers, this study

will reflect the commercial and competitive limitations experienced by the meal kit service.

A comparison of the meal kit service’s function in comparison to the characteristics of

dinner identifies that the social values of its customers are not actively being

accommodated (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997; Daniels et al., 2012; Simmons & Chapman,

2012; Warde, Cheng, Olsen, & Southerton, 2007). When considering the importance of

these values and the meal kit service’s need to differentiate itself from its competition,

these social food values provide an interesting premise to ground this study in.

Furthermore, the exploration of food’s social values also implies the engagement of other

network members in the process (Fischler, 1988), thereby providing an appropriate context

to observe the potential applications of the meal kit by the household network.

This study is motivated by a current interest in service science that calls for further

clarification of how design methods can be used to enhance the implementation of co-

creation through service (Ostrom, Parasuraman, Bowen, Patrício, & Voss, 2015). Therefore,

this study also introduces alternative design perspectives when exploring the meal kit and

its role in value co-creation. Participatory design perspectives and methods have been

selected for two reasons. First, this design discipline is underrepresented in the service

science discipline, despite its strong relevance towards SDL’s perspectives of the role of the

customer in value creation and the nature of value co-creation. Secondly, participatory

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design perspectives and subsequent data collection methods born from them can be used

to inform data collection approaches that effectively capture customer dinner values with

their network. After capturing the customer processes through service concepts, this study

considered how the information could be used by service designers to strategise how

future meal kit iterations that facilitate or enhance the customer’s co-creation of value with

their network. This study concludes with an observational method to assist service

designers in making informed design decisions that accommodate both the customer and

their network’s co-creation of value.

1.2 Research significance In conducting this study from a design perspective, this study’s contribution is significant in

three areas, the first two pertaining to service design and service science literature, and the

third as a means of demonstrating better practices for a commercial entity.

In exploring service science concepts, the proposed method simplifies the contextual

dinner factors that must be considered by a service designer. Furthermore, an exploration

of value co-creation further informs how services can be designed so that customers and

their network composition enact a more significant role in how services function (Storbacka

et al., 2015). The successful identification of this could consequently be utilised outside of

the meal kit context and in other scenarios involving a complex composition of network

actors.

Secondly, this study aims to contribute to the service science discipline by answering

existing calls to demonstrate how design theory can enhance the implementation of service

science concepts (Ostrom et al., 2015; Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). This study addresses

these calls through the application of participatory design and service science concepts,

and subsequently demonstrates how a firm can establish the criteria necessary do facilitate

co-creation with an individual’s network. Participatory design has been selected based on

its underrepresentation in the service science discipline, despite its similar perspectives

with SDL’s notion of the customer’s equal role, how only the individual can create value,

and its appropriate methods when including multiple actors to explore a design

consideration.

Finally, this study demonstrates how the application of service dominant logic through

service design can inform new service iteration’s that are highly beneficial to both the meal

kit service and its customers. It aims to do so by informing service functions that actively

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support/acknowledge the value creation processes of its customers and network. The meal

kit service can provide a service that is beneficial to the service’s customers, which in turn

enables the meal kit service to strongly differentiate itself from its competition.

1.3 Research scope and research questions Both SDL (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) and participatory design (Iversen & Leong, 2012) consider

value to be uniquely determined by the individual and their specific contextual factors. This

study embraces this notion by acknowledging that it is not feasible to define a conclusive

food value typology for the meal kit service. Instead, efforts to understand the functional

customer processes during the identification and creation of these specific food values is

considered more effective. This observation can consequently inform a framework that is

applicable to multiple users, regardless of their specific contextual factors and values. It is

for this reason that a social constructivist epistemology (Kukla, 2000) will be used, as it

directly correlates to value’s socially constructed nature (i.e. value will depend on the

individual’s perception of context). In line with this epistemology, a highly qualitative

research method will be used to explore in depth how meal kit users realise their social

food values. With the study’s epistemology established, the study is guided by the

predominant research question of ‘How can value co-creation inform the design of a meal

kit service model that better accommodates its customers unique food values, while

continuing its provision at a commercial scale?’

With the study’s research question established, this study is guided by three aims that

consequently inform the method of the study:

Aim 1: Identify what values meal kit customers attribute to their process of dinner,

and clarify how the meal kit service contributes or challenges their realisation of

said values.

To reflect the broad and uniquely determined nature of food values (Daniels et al., 2012;

Mintz & Du Bois, 2002), this first aim is realised through the exploration of participant

dinner processes. To achieve this, participatory design’s concept of the fuzzy front end

(Sanders, 2013) was used to explore how customers utilise the meal kit to fulfil their

routine week of cooking and dinner. The fuzzy front end is described as the pre-design

stage in which the mundane and routine processes of participants are observed. In doing

so, a deeper understanding of existing problems and processes can be identified, therefore

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ensuring that the design study is not limited by the preconceived notions of the

research/design team. Thus, this study collects participant descriptions of their weekly

dinner routines with the meal kit, the values (reasoning) that underpin these processes,

and what expectations of function are attributed to the meal kit in relation to participant

processes and why. These insights will then be utilised to address the second aim of this

study.

Aim 2: Synthesise the findings of each participant through service dominant logic

frameworks to establish a common ground from which the meal kit service can

understand what various purposes it fulfils (or fails to) during the participant’s

creation of dinner.

Once collected, the second aim motivated the synthesisation of findings through service

dominant logic’s customer service experience practices (CSEP) framework to enable a

comparison of the unique processes. The CSEP framework does so by converting a series of

specific actions and interactions performed by the individual into a series of practices,

which are representative of each actions purpose during the value creation process (e.g.

the individual actions of looking for recipes on a website through a phone are indicative of

the individual searching). The practices that emerge from the abstraction of unique

participant processes can then be used to infer at a broader level what purpose the meal

kit is expected to fulfil during the participant’s value creation process. These purposes will

then be used to inform the third and final aim of this study.

Aim 3: Utilise the identified purposes attributed to the meal kit service with value

co-creation and service design concepts to propose service iterations that both

accommodate the dinner values identified among participants, while remaining

commercially viable.

In line with the concept of value co-creation, the CSEP findings that emerged from the

second aim were used to inform the service what purpose its customers had attributed to

the service. Core to the concept of value co-creation, a firm’s purpose is not to create value

for its customers, but instead to support and facilitate the customer’s personal creation

(Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Therefore, this study’s third aim implements this understanding of

role and affiliated functions customers associated with the meal kit service, to infer what

service functions are vital for assisting the individual’s personal creation of value, and what

should be left to the individual to arrange/conduct. Therefore, the abstraction of the

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various participant responses into these roles and actions will be used to suggest how they

can be functionally accommodated through future service iterations.

In combination, these three aims are representative of understanding, synthesis, and

informed action. Therefore, achieving these three aims answers not only the research

question presented, but also provides a design process that could be utilised outside of the

meal kit context.

1.4 Thesis outline This thesis is divided into seven sections which are structured according to the stages of

research progress of this study. The subsequent six chapters are summarised in the

following paragraphs.

Chapter 2 presents the literature review, which discusses the current state of food literacy

in Australia and its implications for health. It will then explore both what is being done to

address food literacy, the emergence of the meal kit service, and what challenges are still

present. The first section explores the meal kit service, presents a means of measuring the

dimensions of food and then concludes with why an opportunity exists in the exploration of

food’s social dimensions to benefit both meal kit users and the service itself. The next

section discusses how the marketing paradigm service dominant logic can be utilised in

conjunction with participatory design to first explore these social dimensions. The third and

final section presents the customer service experience practices (CSEP) framework, and

clarifies how it can be used to synthesise participant observations into actionable

information that can be utilised by service designers for new co-design opportunities.

Chapter 3 consists of the methodology and research design implemented in this study. The

first section in this chapter will use the highly intrinsic nature of value to justify the

application of a social constructivist epistemology and subsequent qualitative methodology

implemented in this study. With this qualitative perspective forming the core lens of the

study, this chapter will then describe why participatory design perspectives and tools were

used to inform the research design of this study. The following section will then describe in

detail the research tools used, in what order they were conducted, and their functional

description and purpose in relation to the broader research aims of this study. This chapter

concludes with a section that describes the analytical frameworks utilised to make sense of

the data collected through the research tools.

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Chapter 4 presents the results, which are segmented into five dinner stages representative

of essential processes performed by all participants. These stages were planning the

upcoming week’s meals, collecting the ingredients necessary for each meal, the

preparations and routines that preceded cooking, the act of cooking itself, and how dinner

was eaten. The final dinner stage was also representative of post-dinner activities (e.g.

cleaning) and sourcing food from other commercial agents (e.g. fast food). Within these

five dinner stages, descriptions of the more varied and nuanced activities performed during

the creation of dinner by each participant were placed. These descriptions also contain

descriptions of which actors were involved (including the meal kit), and the perceptions

and attitudes affiliated with the action. This placement of specific activities within one of

the five overarching dinner stages ensured that a comparison could be made between

varied participant actions that were conducted for the same purpose (i.e. reading recipe

instructions via a website versus asking a partner for cooking instructions). This enabled a

comparison to be made around essential moments during the cooking process despite each

participant’s unique method of actions.

Chapter 5 presents the findings. The first section synthesises the shared participant

descriptions pertaining to specific activities through the CSEP framework into

representative practice chains. This abstraction of participant results into practices is then

analysed through service dominant logic concepts to inform the following four sections of

the discussion. These sections describe (in order): The predominant purpose attributed to

the meal kit service by participants and why; how participants appropriated the meal kit’s

use to align with their social values; examples of participant driven modifications to the

service’s function, and how these changes determined the continued use of the service;

and finally, how participant networks determined the resiliency of a meal kits product and

subsequent interaction pattern identified.

Chapter 6 presents the discussion. This chapter will expand upon the analysis of the CSEP

findings and discuss how they can be implemented by a service designer. The sections of

this chapter will discuss (in order): ‘Measuring the network roles attribute to the meal kit’,

which presents a method of understanding how to better enact a supporting role during

the users’ VISC processes. ‘Customer-network led co-creation of the meal kit’, which

discusses the observed modifications of the meal kit by users, and suggests how these

natural changes can better be appropriated by the service to benefit both the user and the

meal kit service. ‘Designing for value co-creation’ shifts the specific focus of the meal kit

22

service, and discusses the study’s combined application of service dominant logic concepts

through participatory design perspectives, and how this affects service design.

Chapter 7 presents the implications and conclusion of this study. This chapter discusses

how study can benefit both the meal kit service and its users in the future, and the

theoretical implications for both design and service science disciplines when developing co-

created services. This section will then summarise the purpose of this study and what was

achieved, acknowledge the limitations of this study, and then conclude with what

opportunities exist for future studies.

23

2. Literature review

2.1 Introduction This literature review is divided into three sections and will demonstrate the complexity

and subsequent difficulties affiliated with the design of services that facilitate the dinner

process at a commercial scale, and what can be done to mitigate this complexity. Section

2.2 will discuss a service model referred to as the ‘meal kit’, and infer how the way in which

it functions has been designed to accommodate the challenges affiliated with the modern

state of dinner in Australia. This analysis will then be contrasted with a more holistic

perspective of what food and dinner is, and demonstrate why the meal kit service’s existing

function is likely to experience challenges. This analysis of food will demonstrate the

difficulty of designing services for food, where the service must address the social and

contextual needs of both its users, and those associated with the user. This section will

then conclude by proposing how the service’s accommodation of social food values present

new opportunities for the meal kit service that both address modern dinner challenges,

while also improving its competitiveness within the Australian grocery market place.

Extending upon the contextual analysis of the meal kit service and the difficulties it faces,

Section 2.3 will explore both service design and service dominant logic disciplines, and

discuss both processes and emergent trends and how they can be used to address the

challenges experienced by the meal kit service. Centring around service dominant logic’s

concept of value co-creation, this section will justify why a shift in perspective is needed

when discerning the customer in the creation of value. From here, the amended version of

value co-creation will be used to suggest why it is vital that the customers network also be

considered in the development of future service iterations that attempt to address the

social dimensions of dinner.

Section 2.4 will describe a service science framework that could be utilised to observe the

unique values of meal kit users, and convert this into actionable information for a service

designer. As such, this framework could prove useful in informing the design of services to

accommodate the difficulties when attempting to develop a commercial service that is still

relevant to the value creation processes of varying customers and their personal networks.

The second section will discuss how the concept of value co-creation can be implemented

by the meal kit service, and the associated marketing and design concepts necessary for

explore this new direction.

24

2.2 The challenges of facilitating the modern Australian dinner through service

2.2.1 Introduction The way in which modern services are designed and subsequently implemented has

increased in both scale and complexity, but promises greater benefits for both customers

and the firm (Patrício et al., 2018). Section 2.2.2 will demonstrate this complexity through

the meal kit service model, which merges both product and service elements to provide a

holistic system that aims to simplify its customer’s creation of dinner. Through the

combined application of meal planning activities, cooking instructions and the home

delivery of ingredients, this service model is representative of a results-orientated product

service system that aims to augment the customer’s dinner process (Nudurupati et al.,

2016). To demonstrate how this service’s complex composition of products and services

benefit its customers, its function will be compared to literature describing the challenges

associated with the contemporary Australian dinner (Banwell et al., 2012c). From this

comparison, this section will infer why the meal kit service has been created to address

these challenges by enhancing the customer’s cooking ability and knowledge, while

improving its convenience.

But while Section 2.2.2 demonstrates the meal kit’s beneficial features, Section 2.2.3

utilises the concepts of food literacy (Perry et al., 2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014; Worsley,

2015) and food security (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015; Clay, 2002) to demonstrate how the

service’s provision of cooking information and improvement of cooking skills is still

insufficient in resolving the modern challenges of dinner (Begley, Gallegos, & Vidgen,

2017). This analysis concludes that the service must also consider how to accommodate the

contextual and social factors surrounding dinner if long-term healthy food behaviours are

to be adopted (Worsley, 2015). This section concludes with a comparison between current

meal kit functions and this holistic concept of food to evaluate the service’s viability. From

this, an understanding will be gained of what other dimensions of food are not being

accommodated by the meal kit, thereby informing new service iterations.

Section 2.2.4 will demonstrate why the meal kit service’s accommodation of these food

dimensions serves to benefit them as well. This section evaluates the meal kit service in

relation to other food-centric firms in the Australian grocery marketplace. In doing so, it is

established what opportunities exist to for the meal kit to differentiate itself from its

competition. This analysis results in the proposition for the meal kit service, where its

resolution of food literacy not only benefits their customers, but also informs service

25

innovations unaddressed by other food related entities – an opportunity that is vital in a

highly competitive marketplace (Alam & Chowdhury, 2016). Section 2.2.5 concludes with

an in-depth description as to what potential social values are peripheral to food and dinner,

and establishes why these values are difficult to address by a commercial entity and what

business concepts may inspire a resolution.

2.2.2 The servitisation of dinner and home cooking Advances in service science and their application through service design have identified

that the mutual provision of both product and service elements can inform service designs

that are highly profitable, more valued by customers, and are considered to be a strong

contender in contributing to the sustainability agenda (Nudurupati et al., 2016). This

mutual application of product and service is referred to as a product service system or the

servitisation of goods (Nudurupati et al., 2016). But these new methods of service provision

are highly complex in their design, as they must consider how to engage with various

customers at different locations, times and interfaces (e.g. in store, internet) (Patrício et al.,

2011). Because of these factors, service designers must consider how services function at a

macro level rather than traditionally focusing on narrow technical solutions (Barile et al.,

2016). As such, service scientists are calling for further work to understand how these

service systems function to better strategise the design and subsequent application of

these holistic product service models (Barile et al., 2016; Ostrom et al., 2015; Vargo et al.,

2016). In particular, a strong interest for future work centres around the empirical

exploration of existing service models to understand how they function in context

(Nudurupati et al., 2016). It is for this reason that the meal kit service model provides an

interesting context for the exploration of this service type.

A recent service innovation, the meal kit service model is a subscription-based service

designed to assist the user’s creation of dinner through the weekly delivery of ingredients

and corresponding recipes to the user’s home. HelloFresh (https://www.hellofresh.com.au,

accessed 1/05/18), Marley Spoon (https://marleyspoon.com.au, accessed 1/05/18), Pepper

Leaf (https://www.pepperleaf.com.au, accessed 1/05/18) and My Food Bag (discontinued),

which all entered the market around 2008, are examples of the meal kit service. These

services share a very similar operation model, which is outlined below with HelloFresh as

an example. The standard service model functions that this study will be utilising functions

as follows:

26

1. Customers subscribe to the service through an online portal. The customer will be

offered a small number of options regarding how the service is delivered to them.

2. Customers first choose which meal variant they want, generally provided as Classic

(Main service offering), Family (simpler meals targeted towards households with

two children and two parents) and Vegetarian type meals.

3. After selecting the meal kit variant, the customer will select the number of nights

they want the service to organise dinner, and how many portions are required for

their household.

4. The ordering process ends after the customer selects a time frame (e.g. between 2

a.m. and 8 a.m.) for the home delivery offered by the service and suggests an

appropriate drop-off location.

5. Once the order is placed, the customer simply waits on the meal kit’s delivery. The

service will utilise a team of chefs and dieticians to plan which meals the service

will provide that week for their customers, which is then generated into set of

recipes.

6. After the meals are planned, the service will source ingredients that strictly adhere

to the arranged recipes, which are both then packaged into a meal kit. Common

staple ingredients such as olive oil and butter are left to the customer to organise,

and are described as ‘everyday ingredients’.

7. This meal kit is then delivered to the customer’s place of residence. To ensure that

the ingredients remain safe outdoors prior to the customer’s collection, the meal

kit is packaged with a combination of insulation and ice packs. The service places

the onus on the customer to waste this packaging, but to reduce wastage the firm

uses insulation and ice packs that can be recycled.

8. The customer then uses the recipes and ingredients provided to cook a variety of

meals over the duration of a week until the next meal kit arrives.

This merger of tangible ingredients with the intangible planning and instruction elements of

the meal kit’s service informs in a process that makes dinner a much easier process for

their customers. Consequently, this service and its commercial offer has the potential to be

highly valued when accommodating Australian dinners in the 21st century, which has

evolved considerably from previous generations. Current trends identify that Australian

households are cooking at home less (Banwell, Broom, Davies, & Dixon, 2012b) as they

source more convenient meals prepared by commercial entities (e.g. fast food, restaurants,

microwave meals) (Banwell, Broom, Davies, & Dixon, 2012a). These changes are motivated

27

by a combination of factors such as an increase in personal mobility, time pressures and a

broader selection of more convenient alternatives to eat (Banwell et al, 2012e). But these

changes in routine dinner are proving detrimental to the population’s cooking knowledge

and skillset in comparison to previous generations of Australians (Banwell et al., 2012b).

This is worrisome, as poor food literacy is affiliated with higher risks of obesity (Banwell et

al., 2012b; Worsley, 2015), which afflicts both high financial and existential costs on an

individual and societal scale (Dixon, 2010). Furthermore, this problem is generational, as

households reliant on an individual with poor food literacy are more likely to experience

and adopt those same poor dietary habits (Lavelle et al., 2016; Simmons & Chapman,

2012). This clarifies why the resolution of the challenges afflicting the modern dinner is

vital, demonstrating that the meal kit service model can play a valued role in the dinner

process.

When contrasting these challenges with the meal kit service’s functions, it can be inferred

that it has decisively designed to improve dinner’s factors of convenience, nutrition and

cooking knowledge. However, the meal kit’s accommodation of these factors, while

important, addresses a very narrow scope of food that is already saturated with solutions.

Walls et al. (2009) and Banwell et al. (2012) conclude that Australians have a much greater

selection of nutritional meal alternatives than previous generations. This is demonstrated

through the similar promises of fresh and nutritional food by most of the meal kit services.

This promise of healthy products is even offered through regular food products in the form

of nutritional information on their packaging, although this impact is argued as highly

limited (Walls et al., 2009). This first demonstrates that many Australians are not

experiencing a lack of healthier options, eliminating a competitive feature of the meal kit

service model.

Furthermore, the dietary concept of food literacy has recently acknowledged that, while

the development of cooking skills and knowledge is essential, the contextual restraints,

self-efficacy and confidence of an individual are also vital determinants of what the

individual chooses to eat (Perry et al., 2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014). Thus, dieticians

acknowledge that an individual’s choice of dinner is socially and contextually informed

(Begley et al., 2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014). An individual might be aware of a food’s

poor nutritional value, but the contextual pressures they experience motivate the selection

of cheaper, unhealthy yet more convenient dinner alternatives (Worsley, 2015). This

demonstrates that, while the meal kit’s offering is convenient, the means by which it

28

enables convenience may create other core problems affecting their customer’s form of

dinner (e.g. dietary preferences, non-traditional family sizes, religious requirements).

These problems demonstrate that a resolution of dinners modern challenges must also

accommodate the ulterior social and contextual aspects of food; Australians are not lacking

in choice of what dinner is, Australians need help in how dinner is perceived, created, and

consumed. It is for this reason that this thesis aims to explore this ‘how’ space, and how it

can redefine the meal kit service model’s function to accommodate the contemporary

Australian dinner. Therefore, the following sections will first present a more holistic

perspective of food, from which this project will argue why the meal kit service model’s

accommodation of these broader dimensions benefits not only meal kit customers, but the

meal kit service itself.

2.2.3 Measuring the benefit of meal kit service through a holistic perspective of food

The previous section demonstrates that, for the meal kit service’s function to be critically

assessed, the dimensions of dinner must to be expanded beyond its most apparent

attributes of ingredients, cooking ability and nutrition. As such, this section will utilise the

concepts of food literacy (Perry et al., 2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014; Worsley, 2015) and

food security (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015; Clay, 2002) to inform a holistic understanding of

food and its underlying characteristics. This clarification of food can subsequently be used

to make an informed comparison of meal kit functions in relation to the characteristics vital

for its customer’s creation and consumption of the meal.

Food literacy is a concept established by the nutrition sciences to inform nutritional

practices, but is finding increased usage by governments and organisations to inform better

policy (Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014). Established in the early 20th century, this concept

centred around the perspective that nutritional knowledge and culinary skills were key to

improving the dietary intake and subsequent health of a population (Worsley, 2015).

However, the effectiveness of this perspective in the modern era is being challenged, as

dieticians acknowledge that the specific focus on cooking ability and knowledge is too

limited, and is proving ineffective when attempting to encourage long-term healthy

behaviours (Begley et al., 2017). It is for this reason that food literacy has evolved to

acknowledge that the social and contextual factors of an individual also play an essential

role in determining what they decide to cook and consume (Perry et al., 2017; Vidgen &

Gallegos, 2014). This demonstrates that the concept of food literacy provides a means for

29

the meal kit to frame and subsequently encourage better cooking and dietary behaviours

of its customers. But despite food literacy’s recent emphasis on how important the

individual’s contextual factors are in determining what is cooked and eaten, the concept is

yet to comprehensively define a measure for these contextual characteristics (Perry et al.,

2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014). It is for this reason that the United Nations Food and

Agricultural Organization (FAO) and its concept of food security (Clay, 2002) will be used to

inform the broader contextual lens that measures the meal kit’s viability in the modern

Australian dinner.

Much like the concept of food literacy, food security originally grounded its focus around

the individual’s ability to access and utilise food (Clay, 2002). But through decades of

application, it was identified that a population’s preferences and subsequent demand for

food are essential motivators when addressing the nutrition based problems of food (Clay,

2002). Thus, through continued iteration, the FAO currently defines food security as ‘When

all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and

nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and

healthy life’ (Clay, 2002). With this overarching definition of food’s three dimensions

established, the FAO’s distils the criteria necessary for achieving food security into four

pillars of availability, access, utilisation and stability (Figure 1) (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015).

Key to this concept, each food security pillar encapsulates the three dimensions of food. As

such, all three dimensions must be realised through the four pillars for the individual to

experiencing food security; i.e. while an individual may be situated nearby a grocery

(physical access), they cannot access the resources if they do not have the money

(economic access). This demonstrates how food security can be provide a specific measure

to supplement Perry et al.’s (2017) ‘extrinsic’ sphere of food literacy. Vidgen and Gallegos

(2014) described stages of planning and managing, selecting, preparing, and eating can be

attributed to exist within food security’s access and utilisation pillars.

30

Thus, with the establishment of food literacy (Perry et al., 2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014;

Worsley, 2015) as the means of determining the impact of the meal kit service during the

creation of dinner, and food security (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015; Clay, 2002) as the

analytical lens to observe the broader contextual influences, this enables the analysis of the

meal kit service’s existing function.

Beginning with food security’s pillar of ‘availability’ in relation to the Australian dinner,

Australia’s strong agricultural abilities economy ensures that a sufficient supply of safe food

can be both produced and accessed (Department of Agriculture, 2014; Xia, Zhao, & Valle,

2017). As such, Availability is not a pressing challenge to consider for the meal kit when

designing for the modern Australian dinner. But the meal kit’s holistic resolution of food

security’s access pillar is more nuanced, as the service’s applicability is determined by an

individual’s monetary, social and contextual factors. The meal kit’s use of dieticians and

home delivery greatly increases the user’s ability to both identify and acquire safe,

nutritious ingredients, thus strongly addressing the physical attributes of access. But the

Figure 1 The FAO’s four pillars of food security (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015)

31

services accommodation of physical access starts to falter through its strict offering of meal

serving quantities, which only accommodates households with either two or four members.

If the individual’s wishes to cook for unconventional family sizes, friends or unexpected

visitors is limited, it fails to resolve the social attributes of food security’s access.

Outside of the physical and social dimensions of ‘access’, a service’s status as a commercial

enterprise also means a user’s access is determined by their ability to purchase the service.

Despite the meal kit’s declaration that the unit price of an individual meal is comparably

less than one purchased at a restaurant (https://www.hellofresh.com.au/tasty/food-boxes,

accessed 1/05/18), this is insufficient, as other direct and indirect financial barriers (e.g.

cost of car ownership, amenities bills, school fees) may limit the individual’s ability to pay

(Upton, Cissé, & Barrett, 2016). This demonstrates that while the meal kit service is largely

beneficial in improving an individual’s physical access to safe and nutritious food, its

commercial status and strict service provision limits the user’s ability to reap these

benefits.

Food security’s third pillar of ‘utilisation’ also demonstrates a polarising degree of

appropriateness when contrasting the physical attributes of food with its social and cultural

dimensions. The service’s usage of dieticians to plan meals ensures the provision of

nutritious produce that strongly addresses the physical dimensions of utilisation.

Furthermore, the service’s provision of recipe cards to instruct cooking processes increases

the likelihood of safe preparation of the ingredients, while potentially increasing the user’s

self-efficacy during cooking, which is beneficial when improving food literacy (Lavelle et al.,

2016). But despite the meal kit’s effective accommodation of utilisation’s physical

dimension, the meal kit poorly accommodates the social, religious and contextual values

surrounding food. This is demonstrated by the service’s small selection of meal kit variants

that lack any accommodation for allergies or preferences beyond vegetarianism. This highly

limits the service’s capacity to address dietary requirements experienced by its customers.

Consequently, meal kit users are not afforded agency over the meals or corresponding

ingredients delivered to them, leaving an onus on the customer to either waste or resolve

the offending meal. Finally, the strict and highly precise ingredient portions delivered also

ensure that the modification or reinvention of service meals to better align with personal

preferences is difficult to achieve. This demonstrates why a failure to consider the

individual’s social or contextual requirements within food security’s utilisation pillar may

prevent the use of the service entirely.

32

When considering food security’s final pillar of ‘stability’, the degree to which the meal kit

can successfully maintain this is dependent on its ability to support an individual’s previous

two dimensions of access and utilisation. This suggests that those who are financially

secure, and lack strong dietary preferences and allergies, are highly likely to unconcerned

about future use of the meal kit. But, the constrained nature in which the service is

provided makes it difficult to accommodate food security’s dimension of stability, as those

with allergies and dietary restrictions will be unable to confidently rely on the meal kit’s

ability to continuously plan appropriate meals.

The analysis of the meal kit’s function in relationship to food security demonstrates that

despite the service’s strong resolution to the physical dimensions of food security’s access

and utilisation pillars, its strict selection and provision of meals poorly accommodates the

economic and social dimensions of food. In conclusion, this analysis demonstrates that the

meal kit service is not sufficiently addressing ‘the dietary needs and food preferences’

(Clay, 2002) crucial to food and its consumption. However, these shortcomings present an

opportunity for the service to innovate its service model and accommodate these

unaddressed dimensions of dinner, and emerge as an essential service.

Following Choi, Foth and Hearn’s (2014) call to place people at the centre of design

opportunity ‘as active agents of food systems who are fundamentally influenced by the

system but at the same time shape the system itself through their varied actions and

decisions,’ this thesis focuses on the social dimensions within food security’s access,

utilisation and stability pillars to explore and inform innovation opportunities for the meal

kit service to enhance modern Australian dinners. It will do so by extending the definition

of dinner beyond its physical form, rendering consumption as comprising of diverse

interactions, gestures and symbols that both motivate and result from its performance (i.e.

a family dinner consists of the consumption of the meal, the household members involved

and the familial conversation at a dinner table). As this section concludes with how the

meal kit has the potential to better address the challenges of modern dinner for its

customers, the next section will demonstrate why the meal kit’s holistic resolution of

food’s dimensions strongly benefits the business as well.

2.2.4 The difficulties of competing within the Australian grocery market

In addressing the broader aspects attributed to its customer’s dinner, the meal kit service

can potentially resolve the poor dietary habits of its customers, while providing a product

33

that also reflects its customer’s food values. But when considering how the meal kit service

would benefit from exploring these changes, this section presents the opportunities that

arise from addressing food’s social and contextual dimensions. This section will also

establish the current challenges the firm faces to then inform which dimensions of food

security would be appropriate to adopt, and the subsequent project direction for exploring

future service iterations.

Beginning with the Australian grocery market place, the meal kit service’s late entry into

the Australian market has proved troublesome. Alam and Chowdhury (2016) and Magner

(2016) emphasise that new entries into Australia’s supermarket industry will face fierce

competition, as they must compete with two predominant supermarket giants. Currently,

Woolworths has a leading market share of 38.7%, which is closely followed by Coles’ 30.1%

stake, with the remaining grocers (including chains such as Aldi, Spar Australia and IGA)

sharing a combined 26.5% stake (Alam & Chowdhury, 2016). Magner (2016) emphasises

that the elastic nature of food produce means that price is the current point of competition

between firms, resulting in low profit potentials (Alam & Chowdhury, 2016). This is

problematic, as being priced out by the competing grocery giants is a severe reality.

When considering the differences between the online home delivery of a meal kit and

traditional grocers, Magner (2016) states that there is an opportunity for potential growth

within online groceries, as the hold that Coles and Woolworths have over the Australian

market has slowed growth in comparison to other online innovations in different markets.

In line with the previously mentioned challenges associated with time pressure, Alam &

Chowdhury (2016) also identified that customers are willing to pay higher prices for

convenience factors such as home delivery and reduced waiting times, features already

present in the meal kit’s service model.

But as both Coles and Woolworths are now implementing variations of online shopping and

home delivery services, a meal kit service will find further difficulty differentiating itself in

an already competitive market. The culmination of these challenges may suggest why, over

the course of this study, two meal kit services have ended their operations in Australia. The

meal kit service My Food Bag was sold to a foreign investor and withdrew from the

Australian marketplace in late 2016 (Dann, 2016; Jager, 2016), whereas Aussie Farmers

Direct closed early 2018 (Hatch & Danckert, 2018). This demonstrates that despite the meal

kit service model’s strong accommodation of food security’s physical dimensions of

availability and access, solely relying on these features will not enhance the degree of

34

competitiveness in relation to the better entrenched competition that also addresses these

dimensions.

Therefore, when strategising which dimensions of food security should be adopted by the

meal kit service to inform the development of new features, this section establishes that

the physical dimensions food security are effectively addressed. Furthermore, the service’s

application of specialists (dieticians, chefs, etc.) to assist in dinner is finding replication

from other predominantly ‘access-focused’ competition. Therefore, in consideration of a

highly competitive market place and replicable service model, this study proposes that the

meal kit service would benefit from expanding its function to accommodate the social and

economic dimensions of food security (Clay, 2002). In doing so, the meal kit service can

consider service offerings that differentiate itself from its competition, while also

addressing the broader contextual food challenges encountered by its customers.

One final limitation resulting from the meal kit’s commercial status is that its existence is

dependent on the profit it makes from its customers. Therefore, the service’s ability to

address the economic needs of its customers will be difficult to accommodate if the

business itself is not at first financially viable. When further considering this limitation in

relation to the highly competitive market place (Alam & Chowdhury, 2016; Magner, 2016),

it can be determined that the social dimensions surrounding food security are the most

appropriate for the service to first explore and then expand upon. In fulfilling both the

physical and social demands of its customer base, the meal kit service’s market position

could strengthen and consequently allow for the future exploration of new service models

that address the economic dimensions of food security. Therefore, the social values that

could be potentially be attributed to dinner will first be explored to determining how the

meal kit can better address food security.

2.2.5 Defining the social attributes of food In its current form, the meal kit service already offers a small selection of meal variants that

broadly correlate to meal preferences; i.e. HelloFresh provides ‘Classic’, ‘Family’ and

‘Vegetarian’ options (https://www.hellofresh.com.au/tasty/food-boxes/, accessed

1/05/18). But these options are insufficient, as these meal variants pale in comparison to

the potential social and preferential food values an individual might attribute to the social

dimension of food security (Clay, 2002). Food security’s utilisation and stability pillars

demonstrate that any convenience or health benefits attributed to the meal kit service are

35

lost if the individual’s dietary, social or religious factors are challenged by the meals

selected. Thus, for the service to sufficiently accommodate the social dimensions of food

security, it is essential that the social dimensions attributed to food security are

understood. Therefore, this section will discuss the potential values attributed to food to

then define the social features vital for accommodating the utilisation and stability pillars of

food security (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015). The clarification of these social components

could then be used to observe the social values of meal kit users and consequently inform

opportunities for the redesign of service functions that accommodate these values.

Our existential dependence on food for nourishment ensures that this core experience of

consumption is universally shared. Consequently, many approaches to food and cooking

have been developed that have shaped a complex, multifaceted practice. For instance, the

enactment of dinner and eating can be representative of deeply rooted values for varying

religious, cultural and social groups (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997). This makes dinner a highly

personal yet universal phenomena that is moulded by the individual’s background, social

placement and ability. Furthermore, an individual’s relationship with food will also vary in

relation to current contextual factors (Daniels et al., 2012). While an individual may enjoy

following the simple cooking instructions of the meal kit after a busy day at work, the same

individual may find the meal kit’s preselected dinners highly limiting as they yearn to

experiment with a personal meal on the weekend. This is because dinner extends beyond

nourishment, and acts as a medium through which social experiences, gestures of care and

status (familial, societal) can be expressed among friends and family (Simmons & Chapman,

2012). Therefore, the attitudes an individual holds towards the use of a meal kit in their

dinner processes will greatly vary in relation to factors such as their employment, family

situation, cooking knowledge and social activities (Daniels et al., 2012).

Warde et al. (2007) argue that food and its consumption can be considered as a structuring

principle for personal and collective experiences, which is used to demonstrate social

position within a network of other actors (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997). Put simply, ‘You are

what you eat’ has an implied meaning to it. When observing groups such as vegetarians,

health gurus, Hindus and so on, the food they consume and the actions utilised

demonstrate the values held dear to that group (Fischler, 1988; Mintz & Du Bois, 2002).

Depending on the individual’s processes, the insertion of a meal kit may enact rapid

changes to an individual’s social habits and routines around food, which can build

resistance towards the new process (Warde et al., 2007). This is because the service not

36

only changes physical processes and objects, but meddles in rich, deeply rooted attitudes,

behaviours and identities held by individuals.

These descriptions of food values provide three elements that can be used to scope the

social dimensions of food (Figure 2). On an individual basis, the meal can be used as a tool

to demonstrate intrinsic beliefs and identities (e.g. a parent’s gesture of care for their

children) (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997; Fischler, 1988). Furthermore, these intrinsic identities

can also be reflections of a larger social group that the individual is aligned with (e.g. a

parent eats dinner with their family/child) (Fischler, 1988; Mintz & Du Bois, 2002). As such,

the meal and its affiliated actions act as a ritual through which personal identity and social

group are connected (e.g. a parent uses the meal to present a gesture of care and

nourishment to their family) (Stano, 2016; Warde et al., 2007).

This suggests that to realise the social dimensions necessary for accommodating food

security’s dimension of utilisation, an understanding of what purpose dinner plays in

relation to the user’s social context (e.g. cooking for a family, showing off for a date) and

what actions are necessary for its success is needed. From this understanding, a

comparison of the social values identified weighted against meal kit functions could

demonstrate to what degree the service supports or challenges the individual’s utilisation

of the service for dinner. This can be done by exploring an individual’s social identity and

their associated social group, and where the meal kit fits (or should be removed) during

ritual. But this proves difficult, as a single individual can be a member of various social

groups (e.g. each social identity in Figure 2 could be attributed to a single individual).

Figure 2 The elements of food security’s social dimension

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In conclusion, this demonstrates how the meal kit could perceive the potential intrinsic

social values its users attribute to food. But the service’s ability to act on this information is

still not apparent, as food values are too broad and contextually motivated for a

commercial service to address on an individual scale. This demonstrates the difficult

position the meal kit service currently resides within, and where it must consider how

flexibility can be implemented in through its product to accommodate the broad food

values of its various customers, but in a way that remains viable for mass distribution. This

predicament could be used to infer why so many existing food services only manage to

accommodate the physical dimensions of food security. But in resolving this challenge, this

also presents a strong opportunity to create a service that greatly differentiates itself

through an innovative service offering. Therefore, the exploration of the meal kit and its

accommodation of unique food values will be examined through the disciplines of service

science and service design to inspire a solution.

2.2.6 Conclusion This exploration of the meal kit service and its ability to accommodate the dinner processes

of its customers presents an interesting case study that demonstrates the difficulty of

designing servitised goods (Nudurupati et al., 2016). The analysis of the meal kit’s services

function in relation to the challenges associated with enacting a contemporary Australian

dinner suggests that the meal kit service model’s current form partially addresses the

factors preventing Australians from cooking nutritious meals (Banwell et al., 2012b). But

after broadening the food’s characteristics through the concepts of food literacy (Perry et

al., 2017; Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014; Worsley, 2015) and food security (Cawthorn &

Hoffman, 2015; Clay, 2002), the subsequent analysis of the service’s functions demonstrate

that its primary accommodation of food’s more apparent attributes limits may limit its

overall viability. This suggests that the meal kit’s failure to accommodate the underlying

social and cultural values of food means that the service may challenge the ulterior aspects

of food, ultimately eliminating any benefit associated with its meal planning and

convenient home delivery functions.

While this analysis demonstrates how the meal kit service could enhance its customer’s

creation of dinner, the observed duopoly with the Australian grocery market (Alam &

Chowdhury, 2016; Magner, 2016) is used to justify why the meal kit service must

implement features that differentiate itself. After analysing the meal kit service’s function

through food security’s physical, economic and social dimensions of food, it was

38

established that the physical dimensions of food have found strong accommodation by

both the meal kit service and its competition. Furthermore, the inelastic nature of the

ingredients sold combined with severe market competition (Alam & Chowdhury, 2016) was

used to dissuade service iterations that attempt to resolve food’s economic dimensions.

This informed the conclusion that future meal kit service iterations should consider how it

can accommodate the social dimensions of food security’s utilisation and stability pillars

(Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015). Doing so will identify what opportunities exist for the meal

kit service, and inform the design of service iterations that addresses the modern dinner

problems identified.

With the project direction established, this study concludes with how food security’s social

dimensions could be further specified, which motivated the subsequent exploration of

food’s social characteristics. Section 2.2.5’s exploration resulted in the observation that

foods contextually informed and highly intrinsic nature (Daniels et al., 2012) meant that a

typology of food values was not feasible. Instead, this literature informed the

characterisation of food’s social dimensions as the individual’s identity (Beardsworth & Keil,

1997), the social group they belong to (Fischler, 1988; Mintz & Du Bois, 2002), and the

ritual utilised to bridge these identities (Warde et al., 2007). From this distinction, it was

determined that for the meal kit service to accommodate the food values of its customers,

it must identify what purpose it fulfils and how, within its customer’s food ritual. But

addressing these social attributes of food security will be challenging on a commercial

scale, as food values are unique and contextually informed; not only on a network level but

even the individual’s attitudes towards foods is dependent on their immediate situation

relative to their context. Therefore, attempting to design a meal kit that is directly

applicable to the multitude of these values is not possible. Instead, new marketing

paradigms should be considered to inform how the meal kit can be designed to balance the

unique food values of its customers with what is commercially feasible for the meal kit.

In response to these modern-day challenges, this analysis demonstrates that the meal kit

service model partially resolves the challenges of modern dinner by addressing cooking

ability, time pressures and health factors through its provision of convenient, dietician

planned, home delivered meals. But while these functions have been designed to directly

correspond to the problems identified attributed to modern Australian dinners, this

analysis of the meal kit’s function in relation to food security suggests the service’s limited

resolution of one of three dimensions of food. This demonstrates that, despite the meal

kit’s convenience and simplicity addressing some of the challenges surrounding the modern

39

Australian dinner (Banwell et al., 2012b), its apparent indifference towards the social and

economic dimensions of food security demonstrate an inability to accommodate the food

values attributed to dinner, resulting in a less influential product. This also highlights lost

opportunities for the meal kit model to innovate its service model to and differentiate itself

among its fierce competition within the Australian food marketplace

2.3 Designing co-creative services 2.3.1 Introduction As previously demonstrated, the meal kit service model partially addresses the food

problems associated with modern Australian dinners, but when viewed through the

concepts of food security (Clay, 2002) and food literacy (Perry et al., 2017; Vidgen &

Gallegos, 2014) there is an opportunity for the meal kit service to broaden its scope and

address the social factors attributed to food. Doing so will benefit its customers with the

creation of a product that is sensitive to the individual’s intrinsic food values.

Accommodating these highly desired factors is also likely to improve the meal kit’s

competitiveness, which is vital considering the market places established and saturated

nature (Alam & Chowdhury, 2016; Magner, 2016). With the project scope established, the

subsequent question of how the meal kit service can accommodate these complex and

varied food values is identified. To answer this question, the discipline of service design and

its application of service science frameworks are advised.

The discipline of service design presents a methodology that the meal kit can implement

when attempting to develop a service model that directly addresses the food values of its

customers. This is because the abductive reasoning utilised by the design discipline (Dorst,

2011; Wetter-Edman, 2009) has already found prominent use when redesigning services to

accommodate the values of its customers (Furrer et al., 2016; Mahr, Kalogeras, &

Odekerken-Schröder, 2013). Therefore, the following section demonstrates how the unique

values attributed to dinner can be understood, how they can be facilitated by the firm

through value co-creation, and how co-creative interactions can be designed into service.

But while service design can be used to develop a service model that attempts to address

the food values of its customers, the way in which the service is designed is dependent on

service science theories used to inform the service’s components.

One such service science discipline is referred to as service dominant logic (SDL). This

marketing paradigm was created from the perspective that only the individual can

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determine and subsequently create intrinsic value, challenging the traditional production

roles attributed with business (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). SDL utilises the concept of value-in-

use (VIU) (Vargo, Maglio, & Akaka, 2008) to redefine the core function of business as one

that supports the individual’s personal creation of value through value co-creation

(Grönroos, 2011; Vargo, Lusch, Akaka, & He, 2010). When considering the previously

discussed food values, the meal kit service’s adoption of SDL concepts could therefore

inform a variety of service functions that benefit the individual’s food ritual, thus enhancing

the social dimensions of food security. Therefore, SDL’s concept of value co-creation can be

used in conjunction with VIU to theorise how the meal kit can balance the desires of its

customers with the capabilities of the firm.

2.3.2 Service design and the meal kit Section’s 2.2.3 exploration of food security’s social dimensions presents opportunities for

the meal kit service to expand its product and accommodate its customer’s broader

dimensions dinner. However, the method through which the service could support these

unique and intrinsic food values at commercial scales is not clear. This demonstrates that

the predominant challenge the meal kit service must overcome to address the social

dynamics of food security lies in striking a balance in its marketing practices that is uniquely

valuable yet commercially feasible. But this predicament is not a new phenomenon. As

traditional marketing practices struggle to achieve this balance (Kimbell, 2014), the

marketing discipline has identified that the adoption of service design could inform the

processes that inspire a solution (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2010).

While the design discipline has traditionally been attributed with the creation of physical

objects and spaces, its placement of the user at the centre of its design decisions has

resulted in the creation of a rigorous problem-solving process (Furrer et al., 2016; Stickdorn

& Schneider, 2010). In this lens, people affected or associated with a phenomenon are

consulted to provide input and discuss the problems they encounter (Sanders & Stappers,

2008). The designer then utilises the information shared by the user to inform the features

necessary for a product or service’s success (Sanders, 2002). Through inquiry and repeated

testing, the application of the design thinking process has proven to be beneficial, as its

inquisitive and open nature presents opportunities to address messy problems (Dorst,

2011). This is why design has found prominent use in the business and marketing discipline

(Kimbell, 2014).

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The merger of the design and marketing disciplines has resulted in a new design typology

referred to as service design, which combines the design thinking process with service

science concepts and frameworks. Kimbell (2011) defines ‘service’ as both social and

material resources that unfold temporally. From these dimensions, Kimbell (2011)

proposes that a service designer must utilise the physical and social elements of those

involved (i.e. firm, customer, employee) to inform the design of complex systems with

which the customer engages to achieve their goals. Therefore, the service designer’s role is

to work with a firm to create objects and systems that make the intangible capabilities and

associated actors (e.g. employees) of the service apparent to the user (Kimbell, 2011).

Holmlid (2007) states that service design’s distinction from industrial or interaction and

experience design can be represented through the scale. Service design utilises a macro

perspective to design a system that extends over a period of time and multiple locations.

This broader system perspective then informs what opportunities exist for interaction

between the firm and customer, which an industrial designer and/or interaction designer

develop the specific product (Holmlid, 2007).

Service design’s existence between design and service science disciplines present a means

of not only analysing the meal kit service’s current functions in relation to food values, but

also provides a method that can convert these insights into actionable concepts (Wetter-

Edman, 2009). Thus, service design will act as medium through which service science

concepts are implemented to the meal kit. For the meal kit service to address the social

characteristics of food security it must consider its purpose within the individual’s dinner

processes to inform how it should function, but ensure that the service model can be

scaled to a commercial level. When acknowledging these constraints, service science’s

theories of value-in-use (VIU) and value co-creation may prove effective when

implemented into the service design process. VIU has been selected as it is a central theory

from which the discipline of service dominant logic emerged (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), and

has found itself embedded within a number of service science concepts. Value co-creation

found prominence within the marketing discipline around the same time as VIU (Prahalad

& Ramaswamy, 2004), and has found mutual application with VIU. Combined, both

concepts are utilised as guiding principles that redefine the nature and function of a

business’s role in the individual’s creation of value, and is why these concepts are highly

relevant for the meal kit’s accommodation of food values.

The axiological concept of VIU provides a functional description that service designers can

use to consider how value is intrinsically created and to determine what should be

42

provided by the service (Mahr et al., 2013; Zomerdijk & Voss, 2010). This concept offers a

vital understanding for the service by informing what unique food values exist around the

meal kit and how they emerge. The concept of value co-creation can then be utilised to

theorise how the meal kit service could embrace the uniquely determined food values,

which subsequently inform the design of service functions that empower the individual to

personally achieve their needs. Service science’s concept of value co-creation has already

found use when defining how to engage with its users (Cesarotti, Giuiusa, Kwan, Introna, &

Spohrer, 2014; Lehoux, 2013), and establish how the business can better facilitate its users’

personal endeavours (Patrício et al., 2011; Storbacka et al., 2015; Wallin et al., 2016).

Therefore, sections 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 will describe these two service science concepts and

inform how the meal kit can be designed to address the social dimensions of food security.

2.3.3 The functional dynamics of value Service designers and marketers are recognising that for a service to be considered

meaningful to its users, both the company’s image and offering must be aligned to the

latent emotional needs of their potential customers (Wrigley & Straker, 2018). Doing so

ensures that customers first recognise a reason to engage with the firm’s services, and

upon interaction, have positive experiences to then justify continued engagements in the

future. The continued facilitation of the customers latent emotional needs by the firm has

been associated with both competitive advantage and enhanced customer loyalty

(Fitzpatrick, Varey, Grönroos, & Davey, 2015). It is for this reason that design’s user centred

methods have been recognised as integral to the development these meaningful

relationships (Wetter-Edman, 2009). Design’s exploratory processes extract customer

perspectives and inform what the customer’s emotional latent needs are, which designers

can then use to subsequently infer how the service can function to facilitate them (Wrigley

& Straker, 2018). It is for this reason that design, and by association SDL, would benefit

from a strong comprehension of value’s functional mechanics. By understanding the

dynamics of value, designers can use this knowledge to better inquire what expectations

and desires meal kit users attribute to the service. From this enhanced degree of

communication, customer values could then be used to develop value propositions tailored

to, or at the very least accommodating of, their food values. It is for this reason that this

chapter will explore contemporary notions of value and how it functions.

Axiology and the dimensions of value and vary broadly among disciplines (Boztepe, 2007;

Fernandes, 2012). Therefore, when considering which definition of value is appropriate for

43

exploring the food values of meal it users, a use value perspective will be adopted

(Fernandes, 2012). This is because a use value perspective states that what people desire is

experience, which forms the motivating factor as to why they engage with products,

objects and services (Boztepe, 2007). Service science utilises this perspective to thereby

acknowledge that value emerges from an individual’s perception of an opportunity or

problem relative to the context they are situated in (Grönroos, 2006; Prahalad &

Ramaswamy, 2004; Vargo & Lusch, 2004).The marketing paradigm service dominant logic

(SDL) utilises this lens to declare that value does not reside within a firm’s tangible product,

but is instead determined by the individual’s observation and analysis of their context

(Ellway & Dean, 2015). This identification of value is referred to as potential value, as the

individual must still engage in action to realise it (Grönroos & Gummerus, 2014). Thus, the

combined process of materialising potential value through action is referred to as value-in-

use (VIU) (Wetter-Edman, 2009).

The next functional characteristic of VIU is that for the individual to create value (i.e. make

changes in their context), they must utilise resources through action (Vargo & Lusch, 2004).

Resources are considered elements that the individual draws on in their attempts to create

value, and are divided into two categories: operand, which consists of physical artefacts

(ingredients, utensils, a car), and operant which are intangible elements such as abilities

and knowledge (Storbacka et al., 2015; Vargo & Lusch, 2004). To create new value, the

individual must draw on the resources of other actors to enhance their personal

capabilities (e.g. learning a cooking skill from a TV show, purchasing a utensil). This reliance

on external resources to create new value is used to justify why the individual will interact

with other actors during the creation of value (Grönroos & Gummerus, 2014).

Ellway and Dean (2015) divide the VIU process into five cyclical stages, which can be used

to redefine an individual’s engagement value with the meal kit (Figure 3). For instance, if

the individual does not enjoy grocery shopping, this necessary but undesired process forms

a misalignment of value (Stage 5). Upon the realisation of this problem, the individual is

predisposed to alternative value processes (Stage 1), motivating the individual’s analysis of

other actors’ resources. After discovering the meal kit’s home delivery functions (Stage 2),

the individual identifies a potential opportunity in the service’s use. After deciding to trial

the service, the individual is consequently delighted to wake up to the upcoming week’s

ingredients on their door step (Stage 3, Engagement in practice). As the individual engages

with the meal kit they evaluate their experiences (Stage 4) by assessing the reality of the

service’s resources with their original expectations. Upon doing so, the individual

44

determines that too many meals have been ordered for their household. Despite this

miscalculation, the individual’s delight at the lack of grocery shopping combined with their

ability to change the number of meals delivered leaves the individual experiencing an

alignment of value within their context (Stage 5), which is used to justify the continued use

of service after reducing the next order’s quantity.

While VIU has found prominent use in the formation of service science concepts, service

dominant logic (SDL) has recently broadened its scope to acknowledge that influence a

network will hold over the individual’s VIU (Vargo et al., 2016; Vargo & Lusch, 2016). This

Figure 3 Ellway & Dean’s (2015) cyclical description of value creation

45

network influence can already be identified within the previously discussed VIU cycle

(Ellway & Dean, 2015). During the individual’s predisposition to value, their evaluation of

surrounding network actors and their affiliated resources is used to theorise how beneficial

these actors are for the individual’s VIU (Grönroos, 2012; Lusch & Nambisan, 2015; Vargo

et al., 2008). Therefore, the individual’s value creation strategy and resulting process is

ultimately informed by how they identify opportunity among the resources offered by

other actors (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2011; Ellway & Dean, 2015; Mahr et al.,

2013; Storbacka et al., 2015). With this broadened influence, Edvardsson et al. (2011) use

social construction theory to describe these network influences and expand the concept of

VIU into value-in-social-context (VISC), which will form the dominating value creation

concept utilised by this study.

VISC implements the sociological concepts of networks, actors, roles and social positioning

to better describe the network influence over the VIU process (Edvardsson et al., 2011).

The adoption of sociology’s concepts of networks, actors, roles and social positioning is

used to broaden the VIU perspective from a dyadic interaction between firm and customer,

and acknowledge that value is shaped by the network the individual resides within (Barile

et al., 2016; Edvardsson et al., 2011; Frow, McColl-Kennedy, & Payne, 2016). When

considering what the concept of VISC implies for the meal kit service, this demonstrates

that the service must not only consider the individual’s uniquely determined values, but

also realise that the service exists within a complex web of actors that also serve a role in

the creation of food values. As such, the meal kit needs to not only identify what the

individual considers valuable, but also understand the service’s social position and affiliated

tasks assigned by the individual for their VISC process. Finally, VISC does not eliminate the

concept of VIU, as this premise still maintains that the individual remains as the only one

capable of realising their intrinsic value. Instead, VISC extends the VIU process by stating

that individual’s creation of value is shaped by the surrounding network (Edvardsson et al.,

2011) .

The application of VISC inspires a shift in perspective, where before asking, ‘What resources

are needed to support the individual’s VISC?’ the firm and/or designers must first ask,

‘Where does the meal kit fit among the individual’s VISC process?’ Therefore, VISC will be

used to describe how food values are both inspired and created by the individual, and how

they evolve in relation to the individual’s network. Despite the functional description of

VISC provided, the application of this knowledge into the meal kit service is still not

apparent, as it is not commercially feasible to individually accommodate the multitude of

46

uniquely determined food values of its customers. Therefore, the meal kit service needs to

strategically consider how it can instead support individuals to create their uniquely

determined values. This can be done through service dominant logic’s concept of value co-

creation.

2.3.4 The meal kit’s role in the creation of value Section 2.3.3 utilises VISC to not only present a functional description of how value is

created, but also demonstrates the individual’s ability to realise their dinner values is

informed by their contextual factors and network members. This therefore cements the

notion that it is not feasible for the firm to design tailored meal kits that reflect the specific

social factors of its customers. But it is for this reason that the service dominant logic (SDL)

paradigm can prove beneficial for the meal kit service. SDL utilises the highly intrinsic

nature of value creation to propose that businesses should discontinue attempts to create

value for their users and instead collaborate with the individual to create value, which can

be done by combining the firm’s specialised functions with the individual’s capabilities and

desires (Storbacka et al., 2015; Vargo & Lusch, 2004). This notion would reframe the meal

kit firm’s purpose from designing a product that corresponds to specific versions of dinner

towards supporting the customer’s personal endeavours as they conduct their specific

version of dinner (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). This dynamic of value co-creation

presents an initial design consideration for the meal kit service, where it should

contemplate designing products that supplement the value creation processes of its

customers, rather than strictly dictating the cooking process (Storbacka et al., 2015).

When considering how this value co-creation can be achieved and what is exchanged

between the meal kit and its customers, many theoretical tools have emerged from this

concept that can be used to advise how the meal kit service can facilitate this supportive

role. Starting with the establishment that businesses can only support the individual’s

creation of value, the individual must first be able to identify how the meal kit’s resources

benefit their personal value creation process (Payne, Storbacka, & Frow, 2008). This

dynamic informs key a perceptual change where the business abstracts its commercial

offering from its literal service/product into a series of potential interpretations used by

customers to motivate their decision to adopt the firm’s resources for value creation

(Akaka et al., 2014; Frow et al., 2014). For example, the meal kit’s pre-selection of

ingredients may not only be perceived as convenient, but their selection via dietician could

also be interpreted as safe and healthy. SDL refers to this redefined commercial offering as

a value proposition, and is used to characterise the resources sold by a firm as malleable, as

47

their application in VISC is dependent on the individual’s interpretation (Akaka et al., 2014).

This dynamic can be used to suggest how users can appropriate the meal kit’s value

proposition for their VISC processes with varying degrees of success, despite the service’s

uniform provision of resources.

With the establishment of what a firm exchanges with its customers to facilitate with value

co-creation with its customers, Lusch and Nambisan (2015) establish the three tiers of

ecosystems, platforms and value co-creation to represent the functional transferral of

resources between actors. Ecosystems is representative of the external actors the

individual engages with to access their resources, and in the case of this study comprises of

participant engagements with the meal kit service, their household network and other

peers. Lusch and Nambisan (2015) characterise the platform as the medium the individual

interacts with to access the resources for value co-creation, and is characterised by its

resource density (i.e. amount of resources accessible during the interaction), which can be

further enhanced through resource liquefaction (i.e. the dematerialisation of resources into

information which is digitally transferred) (Storbacka et al., 2015). As such, the meal kit’s

value proposition is synonymous with the notion of a platform. This provides a means to

analyse the configuration of the meal kit’s value proposition, from which logistical

strategies can be tailored that can enhance the value co-creation processes with

customers.

But while these functional attributes of the value proposition could be used to inform how

the meal kit service can enhance value co-creation with its customers, Grönroos (2011) and

Frow et al. (2014) expand upon the concept by suggesting that the value proposition itself

should be co-created with customers. This is because the active engagement of customers

when determining the resource composition of the value proposition ensures that their

value creation processes are more accurately represented (Grönroos, 2011). This notion is

reinforced, as similar co-creative food studies have demonstrated that the individual’s

inclusion in the development of a value proposition is associated with the generation of

new and highly valued products/services (Filieri, 2013; Sindhwani & Ahuja, 2014).

Furthermore, engaging the individual over a period of time during the development of a

value proposition has been attributed with improved customer loyalty (Fitzpatrick et al.,

2015; Payne et al., 2008). These innovative and competitive benefits therefore present

another design consideration, where future iterations of the meal kit service should

present opportunities for meal kit users to advise what form the value proposition takes.

48

But while these functions of the value proposition demonstrate how the meal kit service

can embody a role of support for its customers, evolutions in SDL literature will broaden

the scope of this support role beyond the dyadic customer–firm relationship. In line with

the concept of VISC, SDL has recently amended a core axiom to acknowledge that value is

co-created among a varying collection of commercial and non-commercial actors (Vargo &

Lusch, 2016). This amendment is highly appropriate when considering the context of meal

kits, as the social and shared nature of dinner (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997; Daniels et al.,

2012) implies that the individual ordering the meal kit service may not necessarily be the

same one utilising its recipe cards or cooking its ingredients. Consequently, this presents an

opportunity to consider how the meal kit’s value proposition supports the creation of value

within its customer’s network, while addressing an emergent research priority within the

service science discipline (Ostrom et al., 2015; Vargo et al., 2016).

When considering how the meal kit service’s value proposition can be designed to facilitate

value co-creation within each of its customer’s networks, Frow et al. (2014) and Storbacka

et al. (2015) provide a number of insights. Both studies acknowledge that the composition

and application of a value proposition will shape a network’s functions as they create value,

and so the value proposition should therefore be designed to align with the actions and

resources of multiple actors during VISC. To facilitate this at a broader level, Storbacka et

al. (2015) conclude that user practices should be used to inform the function of the value

proposition rather than attempting to accommodate specific network actions. With these

considerations in mind, McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) customer service

experience practices (CSEP) framework is advised. Originating from a VISC perspective

(Edvardsson et al., 2011) and initial customer value co-creation practice styles framework

(McColl-Kennedy, Vargo, Dagger, Sweeney, & Kasteren, 2012), the CSEP framework was

developed to convert the actions performed by the individual with other network actors

during the creation of value into a typology of value co-creation practices. When applied to

the meal kit, this framework could be used to distil the various actions performed by the

individual with their network and the meal kit during the dinner during the co-creation of

value. This analysis could then be compared with the individual’s desired food ritual, which

could then infer what the meal kit can do to further support creation of value.

In conclusion, this section demonstrates how SDL’s notion of value co-creation redefines

how the meal kit could address the social elements of food security. Value co-creation’s

associated concepts of the value proposition and how it is used support the individual’s

value creation endeavours provide a means of empowering meal kit users to realise their

49

personal food values while remaining feasible at commercial scales. But SDL’s recent

acknowledgement of network influences in value creation (Vargo & Lusch, 2016) infers that

the meal kit’s value proposition must expand its scope from a dyadic firm-customer

interaction to one where the meal kit interacts with the customer’s network (Vargo et al.,

2016). In response to this, Frow et al. (2014) have identified that the value proposition

must be designed to be an extension of the network’s functions. But to feasibly

accommodate this at a commercial scale, it is advised that the value proposition is designed

to address value creation practices rather than specific functions (Chandler & Chen, 2016;

Storbacka et al., 2015). And so it is for this reason that CSEP’s synthesis of meal kit users

VISC into a practice typologies (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015) presents

opportunity to clarify the role attributed to the meal kit in an abstract manner that can be

accommodated en masse. But before these concepts can be applied to the context of meal

kits, the design tools predominantly utilised by SDL may encounter difficulty when

exploring the newer sociological concepts (Ostrom et al, 2015; Vargo et al. 2016). As such,

SDL must consider new methods of design to implement these theories.

2.3.5 Exploring food values through design The previous section demonstrates how service science’s emergent interest VISC calls for

understanding networks and their influence over the value co-creation process. When

returning to the current state of service design, it is made apparent why the discipline has

evolved into a practice that attempts to synthesise both sociological and material elements

into service (Kimbell, 2011). Consequently, service design has evolved beyond the design of

engagements with the service towards the development of boundary objects, where the

designer must produce objects/experiences which various users employ to generate

personally tailored meaning (Kimbell, 2011; Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017a). Unfortunately, a

traditional design development process does not easily realise this dynamic due to its linear

process and the distance between design team and users when deciding the aspects vital

for the service (Yenicioglu & Suerdem, 2015). In response to these shortcomings, SDL’s

notion that the customer’s role must first be used to distinguish the customer’s

relationship with the firm during the development of a product/service is more

collaborator than recipient (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). From this seminal perspective, SDL

scientists are now calling for a change in service design that extends beyond designing a

singular outcome that is purchased, towards developing long relationships that foster

50

continued engagement and collaboration (Barile et al., 2016; Ostrom et al., 2015; Vargo et

al., 2016).

From this establishment, a design approach that more actively involves customers

throughout the creation of products (i.e. prior to and after purchase) is needed. The case

for experimenting with design approaches is further reinforced after the observation that

service marketing and operational management literature has only made minor attempts

to engage with alternative design theories outside of design thinking (Wetter-Edman, 2009)

and its user-centred design methods (Katzan, 2011; Kimbell, 2011; Sanders, 2013). When

considering how customers can contribute to the design of these services, Dorst and Cross

(2001) propose that creative design solutions are the result from the process of moving

between metaphorical problem and solution spaces until a design concept emerges that

bridges the two spaces. This further demystifies the passive role of a customer by inferring

that their strong familiarity with the meal kit provides a strong basis for inspired and

innovative solutions. This acknowledgement that customers are creative and capable of

contributing to a design process, combined with SDL’s emergent interest in fostering long-

term relationships with customers, suggests that there is an opportunity to experiment

with the participatory design discipline (Sanders, 2002) when determining what the meal

kit must do to accommodate unique food values.

Participatory design originated from a political perspective that those affected by a design

outcome should have a stake in the creation and subsequent application of the artefact or

service (Kensing & Blomberg, 1998). This is because the participatory design discipline

acknowledges that the design of a product or system will influence the user’s creation of

value (Iversen & Leong, 2012). Thus, participatory design’s notion of power addresses this

perspective by emphasising that participants should be afforded equal status and power to

that of the researchers and designers conducting the design process (Sanders & Stappers,

2008). This enables participants to share their personal experiences and knowledge with a

design team, while empowering them to influence the design outcome through direct

access to the designers specialised skill set (Sanders, 2013). When considering how

applicable participatory design’s notion of power is within SDL concepts, parallels can

already be drawn between SDL’s perspective that customers should hold equal status with

the firm during the co-creation of value (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). This conception to include

the individual throughout the development of the design process (Sanders, 2002) is already

present within service science, where the active participation of customers throughout the

service process has been associated with product innovation and customer loyalty (Füller,

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Mühlbacher, Matzler, & Jawecki, 2010; Krug, Korthaus, Fielt, & Leyer, 2010; Payne et al.,

2008).

Participatory design perspectives could also benefit SDL when planning how co-creative

interactions should be facilitated through service. This consideration is essential, as forcing

undesired co-creative engagements, or failing to synthesise the individual’s contributions

to the process into a satisfactory outcome is likely to result in strong, negative attitudes

(Greer, 2015; Heidenreich, Wittkowski, Handrich, & Falk, 2015). This difficulty is further

exacerbated when designing service iterations to reflect VISC, which implies that the meal

kit’s insertion into the users network will change its functional dynamics, and may

potentially challenging existing relationships and processes that are highly valued (Frow et

al., 2014).

Therefore, an understanding of who to include and the degree they are expected to

contribute is essential before deciding how the meal kit service will attempt to facilitate

value co-creation with its customers. It is for this reason that participatory design’s

perspectives towards power could benefit SDL by informing interactions established from

the premise that meal kit users should determine the degree they wish to contribute to the

creation of the meal kit (Wright & McCarthy, 2015). This demonstrates how participatory

design concepts and methods present a means of informing services that encourage long-

term engagements with customers, while mitigating undesired or failed interactions (Greer,

2015; Heidenreich et al., 2015).

The participatory design discipline has developed a number of theoretical tools that can be

used to facilitate the equal and active participation through the design process (Sanders,

2013; Sanders & Stappers, 2012). One concept deemed highly relevant to this study is the

fuzzy front end, which can be used to inform the foundation from which customer-

informed service requirements can be uncovered. The fuzzy front end is described as the

pre-design stage, where the designer engages and subsequently examines the routine

processes and scenarios of participants (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).

When considering how the fuzzy front end can benefit the exploration of participant food

values with the meal kit service, it does so in two ways. First, this exploration into the

routine and mundane processes of meal kit users provides a rich understanding of the

contextual and personal events that unfold during the organisation and creation of dinner

(Sanders, 2013; Sanders & Stappers, 2012). This understanding is vital, as attempts to

address preconceived food values and processes of customers may result in the meal kit

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either failing to assist in the co-creation of value, or even unintentionally challenging other

contextual factors in the process; e.g. adding an extra night’s meal through the meal kit

might force the individual to choose between a regular social evening with friends or

wasting that night’s meal. Therefore, an exploration of the fuzzy front end could also assist

in mitigating deviant or failed value co-creation (Greer, 2015; Heidenreich et al., 2015). The

second benefit that results from the open exploration of the meal kit context and allows for

the discovery of who is involved in the creation of dinner with the meal kit and to what

degree. This understanding provides a description of participant VISC processes

(Edvardsson et al., 2011; Ellway & Dean, 2015), which proves vital when considering how

network actor involvement can be accommodated in future redesign of the service.

This demonstrates that the application of participatory design offers new and interesting

opportunities for implementing VISC theories (Wetter-Edman et al., 2014) that more

accurately represent the individual’s creation of value among their network (Storbacka et

al., 2015). As such, this process allows those being analysed to simultaneously contribute to

the solution of the problem being explored (Sanders & Stappers, 2014). Furthermore,

participatory design’s notion of inclusion also responds to Alam (2006), Vargo and Lusch

(2014) and Barile et al.’s (2016) proposition that the individual should be involved more

actively and earlier in the design of products. In conclusion, a participatory design

methodology provides an opportunity to first explore how the meal kit is used during its

customer’s VISC processes. This analysis in turn can be used to inform potential co-creative

interactions that reflect the social positions customers attribute to the service. But before

any solution or design concept can be considered, the fuzzy front end must first be

explored. An analysis of its customer’s contextual information through SDL frameworks can

then identify what is expected of the meal kit’s value proposition. Consequently, this

understanding can then be utilised to inform the service how to better accommodate an

existing role, or uncover opportunities to perform new, valued roles within its customer’s

network.

2.3.6 Conclusion The meal kit can improve its viability by addressing the social aspects of dinner, but the

unique and varied values attributed to food mean that a service solution is not clear. VISC

demonstrates that value is both determined and created by the individual, but their

processes are influenced by their network. This informs SDL’s prominent concept of value

co-creation, which proposes that the functional purpose of the firm is to enact a support

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role for its customer’s personal value creation processes through the provision of resources

(Wallin et al., 2016). This section concludes with frameworks that have emerged from SDL’s

concept of value co-creation and could be adopted by the meal kit service. If implemented

correctly, these concepts could inform the design of a value proposition that supports a

broad number of its customers, who personally realise their unique food values.

But as SDL’s recent acknowledgement that actor networks shape the VISC process (Vargo &

Lusch, 2016), this must be reflected in how the value proposition itself is designed.

Therefore, the meal kit needs to consider not only how it can co-create value with its

customers, but also comprehend where the service ‘fits’ in relation to the customer’s

network. From this understanding a role can be attributed to the meal kit that describes

how it is expected to perform and what it should provide, while ensuring that this function

does not challenge or replace other vital members of the user’s network. To understand

how the user’s network influences their value creation process, an exploration of their

activities is advised.

Finally, this section combines the emergent interest in network-informed value creation

(VISC) with SDL’s application of design theory to present an emergent opportunity to

explore participatory design concepts. Participatory design already shares similarities with

SDL perspectives regarding the nature of value, and how this determines the

customer/user’s role in the creation of the value proposition. As such, these similarities are

used to inspire the use of exploratory tools that the service designers could implement

when exploring network influenced value creation. This section then concludes with the

notion that participatory design’s fuzzy front-end design stage (Sanders, 2013) can be used

to establish both scope and method used to examine VISC processes customers enact with

the meal kit service. This is because the fuzzy front end and its composition of seemingly

mundane activities can infer the roles and expectations customers presently attribute to

the meal kit service as they attempt to realise their food values (Filieri, 2013).

With both the theoretical lens and subsequent project scope established, the final

applicable component necessary for this study is how the various participant responses

collected can be synthesised by designers into service strategies. The concept of ‘practices’

(McColl-Kennedy et al., 2012) and the subsequent CSEP framework is advised (McColl-

Kennedy et al., 2015) as the primary analytical tool. This is because the framework

abstracts varying value creation actions into a cohesive practice typology. As such, the

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concept of practices and how the CSEP framework implements them into a functional

description of value co-creation processes will be discussed in the following section.

2.4 Using practices to inform co-creation in networks

2.4.1 Introduction It has been established that value co-creation offers a strong solution for the meal kit

service to accommodate the social values its customers attribute to food, consequently

enhancing the service’s ability to address the social dimensions of food security’s utilisation

pillar. But SDL’s recent interest in network influences over value co-creation demonstrate

that further understanding is needed to realise the meal kit’s purpose in relation to

customer food values. For the firm to establish what role has been attributed to it by its

customers during their value co-creation process, an understanding of where the service

functions in relation to their network composition is needed (Storbacka et al., 2015).

Furthermore, to manage the different routines and perceptions attributed to the dinner

process, a framework is needed that can abstract and then synthesise these VISC

processes.

McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) exploration of VISC through the sociological

concept of practices and resulting customer service experience practices (CSEP) framework

present an opportunity to observe an individual’s value co-creation efforts performed

within a household network. Section 2.4.2 justifies the application of the CSEP framework

by first describing how sociologies concept of practices can be used to abstract the unique

actions performed by meal kit user when conducting dinner into a singular, functional

purpose. Section 2.4.3 then describes how McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015)

CSEP framework synthesises these practices into specific functions that correspond to the

value co-creation process. Section 2.4.4 concludes with how the CSEP framework’s

abstraction of meal kit users’ VISC processes into practices can be utilised as a data set that

can be implemented by service designers. This provides a foundation from which informed

decisions can be made for future service iterations that better support the varied VISC

processes of customers on a commercial scale.

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2.4.2 Practices Sociology’s concept of ‘practice’ is used to describe a collection of actions performed by an

individual that share a specific purpose in shaping the socio-material world they reside

within (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2012). These actions are informed by physical, behavioural

and social elements of the world (Kimbell, 2014), which culminate in a cause and effect

dynamic; as the individual’s attempts to shape their network through their actions, their

network reacts to these changes by applying practices to the individual. An example of this

would be a parent cooking a child’s favourite meal (practice applied to network), to which

the child responds in excitement and affection (network responds). As practices are

inseparable from the socio-material world, our actions affect our world, and the world in

turn affects us.

While the application of practices to describe the individual’s value co-creation processes

have found use by McColl-Kennedy et al. (2012), McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier

(2015) extend their work to acknowledge the broader impact of the network through the

customer service experience practices (CSEP) framework. CSEP was developed to

acknowledge the actor roles, interactions and actions performed within a network during

the value co-creation process. Therefore, the social values of food could be understood by

identifying the individual’s intrinsic values in relation to their social group and the food

processes being performed, through the utilisation of McColl-Kennedy’s (2015) CSEP

framework. The subsequent translation of customer VISC processes through CSEP can then

be used to inform how successfully the service accommodates its customer’s dinner rituals

and to determine what its customers are lacking or desiring.

2.4.3 The customer service experience practices (CSEP) framework

McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier (2015) identified 13 practice types utilised during the

value creation process, which are divided among three practice archetypes (Figure 4).

These practices are representative of the individual’s perceived network role during VISC,

the nature of their interactions with other actors as they attain resources, and the purpose

of the actions performed to create value.

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Figure 4 Customer service experience practices (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, and Ferrier, 2015)

Starting with McColl-Kennedy et al.’s (2015) first practice archetype, representational

practices are performed when ‘customers use resources within the service ecosystem to

construct self-concepts and imagery that are consistent with the way they see their world’.

Within this archetype, three representational practices exist that describe the perceived

network role the individual attributes to themselves during VISC. These three

representational practice types can be used to infer the individual’s desired degree of

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involvement during the VISC process, thus characterising the individual’s role to other

network actors (e.g. a leader, a collaborator, an enlister). As such, the motivations of the

individual can also be identified by observing the representational practices they want to

apply to a network. The next practice archetype represents the individual’s efforts to enlist

the resources of external actors for the value creation process. McColl-Kennedy, Cheung

and Ferrier (2015) identified three types of normalizing practices that describe the nature

of the interaction between the individual and network actor during the value creation

process. CSEP’s final exchange practice archetype consists of five practice typologies which

abstract specific actions performed by the individual into their associated value creation

purpose (i.e. searching for resources).

McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier (2015) conclude the CSEP framework with the notion

that the three practice archetypes are interrelated, sharing similarities with other VISC

concepts. In line with Ellway and Dean’s (2015) cyclical description of value creation, an

individual’s understanding of their context determines their relationship with other

network members (i.e. representational practices), influencing their decision of which

actors and their associated resources they can draw on (i.e. normalizing practices), which

determines the actions possible for them to conduct to value creation (i.e. exchange

practices).

2.4.4 CSEP’s role in addressing the social dimensions of food security

When considering how the CSEP framework can benefit the meal kit service, it is expected

to act as the analytical tool that abstracts VISC data collected from the fuzzy front end. As

previously stated, before service designers can consider how to engage with an individual’s

social dimensions of food security, section 2.2.5 establishes that the meal kit must first

understand where it exists within the user’s food ritual (i.e. VISC process). Through McColl-

Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) CSEP framework, the individual’s value creation

process can be observed and divided into practices that characterise their perceived role,

whose resources are drawn on during the value creation process and the nature of this

interaction, and the purpose attributed to the actions performed to attain value (e.g.

searching, play). This distillation of unique actions into collated co-creation practices can

then inform what purpose and affiliated functions have been attributed to the meal kit

within the individual’s network.

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A service design team can then convert these core purposes attributed to the meal kit into

a set of criteria to discern whether to continue, reconfigure or remove aspects of its

performance to support the individual’s VISC process. For instance, the CSEP’s

representational practices can be used to infer whether the service challenges the

individual’s desired degree of authority affiliated with a task being performed.

Consequently, the representational practices identified among customers could be used to

distinguish which tasks customers prefer to be assisted with or even adopted by the service

(i.e. producing practices), and what should be left to the individual’s endeavours (i.e.

assimilating practices). This application demonstrates how an understanding of customer

roles attributed to the meal kit can be used as a metric by service designers to gauge how

effectively the service’s function aligns with the expectations of the individual. This

distinction is vital, as forcing customers to engage in undesired co-creative activities has

been found to be more destructive than if the individual engaged in a regular processes,

and can potentially result in ‘value co-destruction’ (Heidenreich et al., 2015).

Therefore, CSEP’s distillation of unique VISC processes into a series of abstracted of value

creation ‘purposes’ (i.e. role, interaction and action) provide a data set that can inform the

design of flexible elements into the meal kit’s value proposition. This flexibility provides an

opportunity for the individual to personally adapt service resources to more closely align

with the network role they attribute to the meal kit. As Chapter 1 has established, network

actors are attributed a social position relative to the rest of that network, and so it is

essential for external actors to perform that expected role or otherwise be replaced

(Edvardsson et al., 2011). Therefore, in fulfilling these addressing these core purposes

identified through CSEP, the meal kit performs its expected role during the individual’s food

ritual, thus co-creating value with the meal kit and ultimately addressing the social

dimensions of food security.

2.4.5 Conclusion Sections 2.4.3 and 2.4.4 demonstrate how the CSEP can be used to understand how the

meal kit can better accommodate the social dimensions of food security. As an analytical

tool, it offers the potential to abstract many broad and unique VISC processes of meal kit

customers, and distil the findings into a series of roles each household attributes to the

meal kit. From CSEP’s analysis, the results could then be used in conjunction with other

value co-creation frameworks to determine strategies for service designers to implement

into the meal kit’s value proposition. If successfully implemented, this offers a potential

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process where the meal kit provides resources that the individual can personally adapt or

modify themselves, rather than challenging or replacing aspects of their network. If the

meal kit successfully adopts this support role within their customer’s VISC processes, it will

enhance their customer’s ability to personally attain the potential food values discussed in

Section 2.2.5, thus improving their value among their customer’s network and enhancing

their competitive edge in relation to the competition.

2.5 Summary This literature review centres around the emergent meal kit service model to exemplify the

difficulties affiliated with the design of servitised goods (Nudurupati et al., 2016). Despite

its endeavours to address the difficulties associated with the contemporary Australian

dinner (Banwell et al., 2012d), section 2.2.3 demonstrates that its rigid service delivery may

instead challenge the values and preferences its users (and their households) associate

with dinner. Furthermore, section 2.2.4’s analysis of the Australian market place

demonstrates that the meal kit service model must compete against a duopoly (Alam &

Chowdhury, 2016; Magner, 2016) that also primarily accommodates the physical

dimensions of food security. These factors demonstrate major problems for the meal kit

service, as its service offering is saturated within the Australian market place and may also

challenge the food values its customers.

However, the shortcomings of the meal kit service present both opportunity and

motivation for the service to explore new meal kit variants that address its customer’s

unique food values. In doing so, the service has the potential to be more valued while

simultaneously differentiating itself from its entrenched competition. As such, this study

aims to identify how the meal kit can be designed to accommodate the social food values

its customers through its product. After section 2.2.5’s examination of food’s social

dimensions (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997; Daniels et al., 2012), the analysis identifies the meal

kit service must consider how it can accommodate the vast number of unique values

attributed to dinner at a commercial scale.

With the challenge established, the service design discipline and its implementation of

service science concepts were selected to form a theoretical basis from which solutions for

the meal kit’s challenges would be explored. These disciplines were decided as service

dominant logic’s (SDL) reconceptualisation of the firm’s purpose as one of enacting a

supportive role (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), and its concept of value co-creation (Vargo & Lusch,

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2016) was identified as highly appropriate. This was because value co-creation re-

establishes the meal kit’s purpose as one that supports the individual as they personally

realise their intrinsic values. As such, this reframing of service purpose and subsequent

function demonstrates a solution where the meal kit more heavily relies on its customer’s

capabilities, while determining what resources are necessary to fulfil this less involved

support role through its mass-produced product (Storbacka et al., 2015). This redefined

service function is further informed through the affiliated value proposition concept (Frow

et al., 2014), which if adopted by service designers, could be used to strategise what

exactly the meal kit service must exchange with its customers and facilitate this support

role.

After establishing the meal kit’s purpose through value co-creation, section 2.3.4 then

considers how service science concepts could establish what resource composition are

necessary for the meal kit’s value proposition and how it should function. SDL’s recent

acknowledgement that value is co-created among networks (Vargo & Lusch, 2016) was first

used to clarify that the meal kit’s value proposition needed to be designed to

accommodate multiple network actors rather than the traditional focus of a single

customer (Storbacka et al., 2015). This development in SDL theory (Vargo et al., 2016;

Vargo & Lusch, 2016) was used to justify why participatory design methods should be used

to inform how the meal kit implements value co-creation into its service. The decision to do

experiment with new design concepts was further reinforced after identifying service

science’s emergent interests in exploring how design methods can be utilised to implement

service concepts (Ostrom et al., 2015; Wetter-Edman, 2009; Wetter-Edman et al., 2014).

Therefore, this study first demonstrated how participatory design philosophies

(Frauenberger, Good, Fitzpatrick, & Iversen, 2015; Kensing & Blomberg, 1998) shared

similarities with SDL’s perspectives (Storbacka et al., 2015; Vargo & Lusch, 2004) towards

the nature of value, the role of the individual when creating it, and concluded with how

participatory design’s consideration of power could potentially negate challenges of

implementing value co-creation (Greer, 2015; Heidenreich et al., 2015). With these

similarities and benefits established, this study consequently identified participatory

design’s fuzzy front end (Sanders, 2013) as a powerful tool to collect rich insights pertaining

to meal kit users VISC processes (Edvardsson et al., 2011; Ellway & Dean, 2015). This was

used to justify why the fuzzy front end will be used to scope the project around the

exploration of the routine processes and experiences of meal kit users within their

network. This work then adopts Storbacka et al. ’s (2015) conclusion that value

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propositions should be informed by an analysis of value creation practices. The abstraction

of processes into practices provides a means for service designers to holistically understand

the purpose of the meal kit service in relation to the established processes of its users,

rather than being inundated by highly specific yet contextually dependent processes. As

such, this suggestion motivated the decision to utilise McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and

Ferrier’s (2015) CSEP framework to synthesise the varied VISC processes of customers

collected from the fuzzy front end. In summary of the literature, the subsequent goal and

leading research question for this project is:

‘How can value co-creation inform the design of a meal kit service model that better

accommodates its customers unique food values, while continuing its provision at a

commercial scale?’

To address this question, the literature review has inspired the division of this research

project into three parts of collection, synthesis and application:

1. Use participatory design’s fuzzy front end to observe routine customer VISC

processes as they create dinner.

2. Use the CSEP framework to synthesis customer processes into a series of practices

that are representative of value co-creation with the service.

3. Use these findings in conjunction with other service dominant logic concepts and

infer how the meal kit is utilised during customer VISC, and use this to consider

where the service fits in relation to their network and process. Further SDL

concepts can then be used to inform service functions that would be readily

implemented through design.

With the research question clarified and its subsequent aims presented, Chapter 3 will describe in detail how these aims and research question will be resolved.

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3. Research design and method

3.1 Introduction This chapter is divided into four sections. Section 3.2.1 will demonstrate why the

intrinsically determined nature value in conjunction with this research project’s aim to

understand how to address a variety of these values forms the justification for a social

constructivist epistemology to underpin the methodology and subsequent research design

of this project. Section 3.3.3 will then explain why participatory design philosophies and

conceptual tools are used to define the scope of this research project, in addition to the

generative tools utilised for the data collection process. Section 3.3 will explain the specific

research design utilised by this study. As the cognitive map research tool utilised by this

study had to first be appropriated for the meal kit context, sections 3.2.2 and 3.3.3 will

reflect the various stages of the cognitive maps development, which section 3.3.4

concludes by describing how the final cognitive mapping exercise was conducted with

participants. Section 3.4 then describes what design and marketing frameworks were

implemented to analyse the raw data collected during this study. This section is divided

into two frameworks: It starts with the Kimbell's (2011) actions, environment, interactions,

objects and users (AEIOU) framework used to convert mind mapping responses into

components for the cognitive mapping activity; and the CSEP framework, which

synthesised participant responses from the cognitive mapping activity into practices that

formed the core of the discussion.

3.2 Research design 3.2.1 Introduction

Section’s 2.2.5 and 2.3.3 demonstrate that meal kit users will conduct a series of differing

processes with the meal kit service to realise their intrinsic values affiliated with dinner.

Axiological characterisations of value emphasise its contextually influenced nature,

ensuring that each participants creation of value is nuanced (Ellway & Dean, 2015;

Fernandes, 2012). It is therefore unrealistic to consider refining the multitude of duplicitous

contextual influences experienced by a user sample into a definitive typology of food

values that are representative of all meal kit users. Instead, this study utilises a

constructivist epistemology to reflect value’s complexity (Kukla, 2000). Consequently, this

study first recognises that there will be no single objective ‘truth’ representative of every

participant’s value creation process during dinner, and that the outcomes of this study will

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not be universally applicable to all meal kit users. From this epistemological position, this

study also embraces the complexity of potential food values by encouraging the use of

participant experiences to inform the findings. This approach is appropriate as it leans

towards an analysis of user processes to identify the methods used to achieve their values,

rather than the resultant values themselves.

With this projects epistemology justified, a qualitative methodology has been deemed

appropriate to underpin the implementation of this study. This decision is reinforced by

predominant factors. First, marketing (Furrer et al., 2016) and design disciplines (Sanders &

Stappers, 2012) both recognise that qualitative research tools present an effective means

to collect deep user insights relating to their processes and experiences; both of which

prove integral in informing design criteria of a project. Therefore, as both these disciplines

form the prominent theoretical foundations of this project, it is suitable to adopt a

qualitative methodology to explore value co-creation. Outside of existing professional

research practices, this project recognises qualitative methods as essential for the

collection of theoretical elements for this project. It is central to this study’s objectives to

not only identify the values participants attribute to the meal kit service, but how these

values are formed and why. While quantitative measures could be used to infer the

popularity of specific engagements between participants and meal kit service when

creating intrinsic value, the lower fidelity of this resultant data set would not contain the

information necessary to infer why participants conducted themselves in this manner

(Kimbell, 2011). Value’s highly intrinsic and contextually informed nature dictates that the

information necessary to understand value co-creation can only be collected via research

methods that examine participant activities in depth. When considering why a mixture of

qualitative and quantitative methodologies have not been selected, this study recognises

that attempts to analyse the higher reasoning behind participant actions at quantitative

scales would prove overwhelming due to the previously mentioned magnitude of

contextual factors that influence the co-creation of value (Ellway & Dean, 2015).

3.2.2 Participatory design and the fuzzy front end As neither business nor designer can determine what their constituents consider valuable

(Vargo & Lusch, 2004), this should also be reflected in the method in which this study is

conducted. Therefore, the exploration of participant dinners and how it relates to the

creation of value should therefore be described by the participant in their terms, rather

than responding to a protocol formulated from a researcher’s preconceived notions of a

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participant’s context. It is for this reason that participatory design methods are highly

appropriate for the exploration of values pertaining to food and meal kit services. As

demonstrated in the literature review, participatory design is both a process and

philosophy. Founded from the perspective that those affected by an outcome should be

therefore hold a stake in its development and implementation (Kensing & Blomberg, 1998;

Wright & McCarthy, 2015), the participatory design discipline has created a variety of

generative research tools to enable this type of design (Sanders & Stappers, 2012, 2014).

Furthermore, participatory design’s proposition that researcher, designer and participant

are mutually involved throughout the design process informs a method of inquiry that can

reduce the bias of conventional research. This is achieved by including participants before

the specific project problem or subject has been defined. Consequently, participants can

declare what is of core importance to their situation, which enables researchers to uncover

foundational problems rather than shallow symptoms associated with the problem

(Sanders, 2013). This notion of exploration prior to development is shared within the

marketing discipline as well, where Alam (2006) states that the success of a product is

much higher the earlier the user is included in its design. Therefore, it is here that

implementing a participatory design methodology could inform new scenarios unexpected

by the researcher (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). From this point, both researcher and/or

designer can collaborate with the participant to define a project scope and development

goals that are centred upon a problem that holds importance with the participant. It is for

this reason that participatory design concepts are highly relevant for exploring the highly

intrinsic nature of food and its social dimensions.

When addressing the complexities of user value within the meal kit, participatory design’s

Fuzzy front end and will be utilised. The fuzzy front end is described as the pre-design

phase, where the user and their contextual elements are explored without any

preconceived goals or expectations (Sanders, 2013). Therefore, this project will narrow its

scope to the exploration of participants’ routine use of the meal kit within their

households. With the project scope established, the participatory design tools used to

collect the data from the fuzzy front end will be described in the following section.

3.2.3 Make tools

Elizabeth Sanders is a prominent participatory design researcher who has established a

variety of research methods referred to as ‘make tools’ (Sanders & Stappers, 2012), which

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are designed to explore the fuzzy front end. These research tools are exploratory in nature,

and aim to provoke multiple insights from participants that can be used to inform future

developments, rather than a narrow, definitive solution. ‘Make tools’ are divided into

‘make’, ‘say’ and ‘do’ methodologies, each designed and practised differently to generate

specific research outcomes. ‘Make’ relates to generative prototyping sessions where

participants imagine specific futures of a context; ‘say’ consists of interviews and focus

groups to describe participant perspectives; and ‘do’ refers to participant enactments that

are measured through observations and user testing (Sanders & Stappers, 2014).

Make tools are highly qualitative in their design, and exploratory in nature. Rather than

asking preconceived questions, make tools engage the user through activities in a way that

encourages them to generate personal insights surrounding a selected context. But these

‘make tools’ must themselves be designed and appropriated to fit the specific user

demographic and the context that is to be explored. After consideration, Sanders and

William’s (2003) ‘cognitive map’ was chosen as the basis of the research tool.

3.2.4 The cognitive map

The cognitive map is a combination of ‘make’ and ‘say’ methodologies. It consists of a semi-

structured interview run in parallel with a paper crafting exercise that utilises prompt

cards. The prompt cards consist of a combination of images, words and phrases. The aim of

this exercise is to encourage users to generate their experiences and ideas through images,

words and questions that prompt the participant into discussion with minimal leading from

the interviewer (Sanders & William, 2003). The use of images is important, as their

subjective nature enables the participant to interpret them in a multitude of ways. The

words selected for the prompt cards are largely emotive and can be combined with images

or other word cards, and are effective at colouring participant experiences. Finally, the

prompt cards used should not consist solely of the subject being explored (i.e. cooking), but

also include cards that are abstract. This is to enable participants to describe important

factors and emotions that are peripheral to the context in focus. This broad format allows

for flexibility in the participant’s response, which results in the generation of broad and

unexpected results, such as previous experiences, current problems and perceptions of

possible futures (Sanders & William, 2003).

But the act of dinner does not centre entirely on eating. As informed by food literacy (Perry

et al., 2017; Worsley, 2015), this study considers the experience of cooking to consist of

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collecting the ingredients, the (sometimes spontaneous) selection of the meal, the

afternoon activities prior to cooking and so on. Therefore, it was important to capture

activities that cover a wide spectrum of time when appropriating the cognitive map tool for

cooking contexts. Thus, a timeline was included to the cognitive map methodology to

represent this. The timeline was designed to encapsulate a week of using a meal kit service,

each week-long period starting when a meal kit was ordered, and ending upon the next

order of the service. This was selected in response to timing constraints of the study and

the limitations of the individual researcher, it was not feasible to conduct and then analyse

a week’s worth of observations for multiple participants.

To resolve this, the day reconstruction method (DRM) (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade,

Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) was used to generate the timeline component of the cognitive

map. The DRM methodology consists of having participants personally record specific

activities of their day through a medium (journal, pictures, voice recording, etc.). This

medium is then used later to discuss with the participant specific moments of their day.

This process of self-recording improves participant recall when asked later interviewed.

This is because inserting an unusual activity into routine processes forces the participant to

become aware of that moment (Kahneman et al., 2004). Therefore, prior to conducting the

cognitive map exercise, participants were asked to perform a cultural probe activity for a

week. A cultural probe is a generative tool used to provoke or elicit a response from those

being observed, and motivate an open-ended contribution that is representative of their

perceptions and attitudes of a phenomena (Martin & Hanington, 2012; Sanders & Stappers,

2014). The cultural probe for this study took the form of a photographic exercise, where

participants were asked to capture specific service moments during their week using the

meal kit service. These photographs were then implemented into the cognitive map

timeline to later aid in participant recall and prompt discussion around that specific

moment during the exercise.

3.2.5 Summary

Section 2.2.5 and 2.3.2 establish that the values meal kit users associate with dinner will be

intrinsic and contextually informed. These properties of value are therefore used to justify

this studies application of a social constructivist epistemology and the subsequent

qualitative methodology. As such, section 3.2 utilises this epistemology to reason why the

highly explorative and generative nature of participatory design, and its affiliated tools will

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be utilised. This is because, for customer values to be address by the meal kit service, it is

vital that participants share their attitudes and values pertaining to the use of the meal kit

prior to the selection of a solution, rather than developing the study’s research criteria

around the preconceived notions of the researcher. Therefore, this study will adopt a

qualitative methodology that encourages participants to share their perspectives relative

to the meal kit service.

Sections 3.2.2 and 3.2.3 demonstrate why participatory design and its philosophy of

participation reflect the qualitative goals of this study. This is because participatory design

and its affiliated tools aim to provide a means by which participants can openly describe

the phenomena in focus (Wright & McCarthy, 2015). Therefore, this study’s aim to have

participants clarify their experiences of routine meal kit use will be achieved via

participatory design’s fuzzy front end (or pre-design) stage and will establish the scope of

exploration for this study. With this study’s scope established, participatory design tools

will also be used, as their generative nature can be used extract rich narratives pertaining

to routine participant habits and processes enacted with the meal kit. These descriptions

can infer not only processes performed, but other actors involved and the perceptions and

experiences attributed to these processes (Sanders & Stappers, 2014), which accurately

represents the dimensions of VISC (Ellway & Dean, 2015). The final added benefit of these

generative participatory design tools is that their format also encourages participants to

share their desired futures (Sanders & Stappers, 2012), which can also be used to inform

future service iterations.

The final section demonstrates why Sanders and William’s (2003) cognitive map activity has

been selected to explore the fuzzy front end and extract participant VISC with the meal kit.

This is because this research tool’s flexible delivery and open interpretation enables

participants to not only provide descriptions of their use of the meal kit, but also

encourages them to share their desired futures and expectations of use via the prompt

card provided (Sanders & Stappers, 2014). This data is highly relevant for exploring

participant VISC, and also informative when considering what form future service iterations

should take when attempting to facilitate future value co-creation with

customers/participants.

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3.3 Method 3.3.1 Introduction

With the qualitative methodology and research design established, this section describes

how the cognitive map exercise was both developed and then implemented with

participants. Sanders and William (2003) state the cognitive map activity must first be

designed to accommodate the specific context it aims to explore. As such, section 3.3.2 will

first describe the preliminary mind mapping and cultural probe activities that were used to

inform components of the cognitive map activity. The following section will then describe

the development of the cognitive map activities which formed the primary data collection

to be utilised in this study to gather participant descriptions of their VISC processes. This

section will then conclude with the final protocol participants were asked to perform

during the cognitive mapping activity.

3.3.2 Online mind map and prompt deck

To reduce biases within the prompts selected for the cognitive map, Sanders and William

(2003) suggest sourcing contributions from multiple participants external to the study. To

achieve this, a mind map was used to generate a broad range of interpretations towards

the concept of dinner and eating, and subsequently inform the prompts used in the

cognitive map activity. A mind map is a visual diagram used to demonstrate associations

towards a particular concept (Martin & Hanington, 2012). The concept in focus is written in

the centre of the page. Associated themes or subjects are then written, placed or drawn

around it. Fifteen individual mind map templates were created in an online ‘Google

Drawings’ document. The template only consisted of the phrase: ‘What I think of when I

hear dinner’ wrapped in a circle placed in the middle of the page. Fifteen participants were

then recruited through social media to participate in a mind mapping activity. Before

starting the activity, participants were presented with a mind map example, and then were

asked to provide 15 words and 15 images that they associated with dinner in the online

mind map (Figure 5). To achieve this, participants self-enlisted by following a link provided

in an enlistment post on social media (see Appendix A). Participants were not screened, as

a random sample was desired to broaden the results. Overall, 150 images and 150 word

prompts were collected from the mind mapping activities.

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The images and words were then analysed through Kimbell’s (2014) AEIOU framework to

refine and curate the prompts to a total of 100. This framework was selected as it dissects

complex service processes that an individual interacts with into key functional components

of actions, environment, interactions, objects and users (AEIOU). Prompts that could

represent multiple AEIOU categories were prioritised for the prompt deck, as they were

more flexible in their interpretation. Towards the end of the curation process, the prompts

were then assigned to specific AEIOU categories for the cognitive map exercise. This

segmentation of the prompts was designed to improve the participant’s ability to scan and

select the prompts quickly by category when conducting the activity. Finally, blank AEIOU

prompt cards were created as a backup if the participant wanted to express something that

was not provided in the prompt deck (Figure 6).

3.3.3 Cultural probe

As this study was interested in a participant’s routine use of the meal kit, it was important

to distinguish these practices relative to the stages of use. This required the element of

time be measured, which resulted in the application of a timeline to the cognitive map

activity. The day reconstruction method’s (DRM) use of activities to improve awareness of

Figure 5 Mind map responses

Figure 6 Blank prompt cards in use during pilot study

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specific moments in a process was used to inspire a small cultural probe to both record

these practices in service and prep participants before conducting the interview

(Kahneman et al., 2004). To centre the cognitive map exercise around the meal kit,

participants were prompted to photograph specific moments when using the service. A

combination of primary and secondary research was used to inform the design of a cultural

probe. The secondary research consisted of a competitive analysis of several websites of

various online food services. HelloFresh, Marley Spoon and My Food Bag were chosen to be

the focus of this study due to their similar service function (home delivery, pre-set meals,

dietician approved, etc.). The primary research consisted of a personal two-week trial of

the meal kit HelloFresh, which was recorded in an online reflective journal (see Appendix B)

(https://brettsfood.tumblr.com, accessed 1/05/2018).

The primary and secondary research informed nine service prompts, which were divided

among four major service stages. The first stage centred around ordering and receiving the

meal kit. Participants were asked to photograph who ordered the meal kit and where,

where the meal kit is usually delivered, and what an unboxing looks like. The aim of this

stage’s final prompt was to have participants take note of the quality of the produce, and

describe how it all gets into the fridge. The second stage revolved around the events that

led up to and during the cooking process for each meal. Participants were asked

photograph elements of the meal they may have modified, removed or had difficulty with,

and what they would consider a successful/unsuccessful meal. The third stage explored the

process of eating the meal, where participants were asked to show where they ate dinner

and with whom. The goal of these images was to also get a brief snapshot of how the meals

are accepted by other members in the household. The fourth and final stage aimed to

identify post-service processes and what happens when the participant is not using the

meal kit (as the service provides a maximum of five dinners). This final stage was also

developed to discuss moments where the food service was failing, and ways the participant

may tweak the function of the meal kit to align with personal needs.

The cultural probe sent to participants took the form of a double-sided A4 poster and was

designed to be easily completed with a smart phone (Figure 7). The front of the poster

introduced the participant to the point of tasks, what they needed to do. Below the

description were the nine image prompts divided into the four service stages. On the back

of poster, the email address, the email protocol and an image of an email example were

provided. Participants were asked to hang the poster in a highly visible space in their

kitchen to act as a reminder to complete the task. Finally, when ex-users of meal kit service

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were added to the participant pool, these four main service stages remained the same, but

the sub-questions were altered. Instead of asking about how the meal kit was used, it

asked how they had replaced their processes and to highlight elements that worked better

or worse than using the service.

3.3.4 The cognitive map

In line with Sanders and Stappers’ (2014) make tools, and primary and secondary research

were used to inform the development the cognitive map’s components and protocol,

which were iteratively designed throughout the initial data collection stages of this study

Figure 7 Cultural probe Information

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(see Appendix C). The primary research consisted of the initial two-week trial to inform the

cultural probe questions/prompts, and the mind mapping exercise was used to reduce bias

in the development the dinner image prompts. Finally, pilot studies were conducted

towards the later stages to both practice the delivery of the exercise, and further refine the

prompt deck generated from the mind map (see Appendix D). The responses from the pilot

studies were also used to tally the use of each prompt card and determine how effective

each prompt was during the exercise. Secondary research consisted of using Sanders and

William (2003) to inform the overall structure and function of the cognitive map activity, in

conjunction with Kahneman et al. (2004) and Sanders and Stappers (2014) to inform the

timeline-based elements for the data collection. Finally, primary and secondary research

was used to generate a discussion guide (see appendix D), which was used to guide the

interview during the cognitive mapping exercise and ensure standardisation in process

among the different participants (Sanders & William, 2003). The guide consisted of

questions pertaining to their processes during the week (both with the meal kit or affected

by the service), as well as perceptions and attitudes relating to the activity. Some questions

included:

• ‘Do you feel like much has changed in your daily processes now that you’re using

the service?’

• ‘Do you feel pressured to cook every night?’

• ‘Do you ever modify the meal provided? If so, how do you do it and why?’

• ‘Is there anything notable about your process that frustrates you? Have you tried

doing anything different?’

• ‘Is there a feature that you feel would greatly benefit you if it was implemented by

the service?’

The subjects enlisted for this study consisted of individuals that are currently, or have

recently cancelled using, an online food service (e.g. HelloFresh, FoodConnect) to cook for

either for themselves or for a group (e.g. family, roommates). If a participant had cancelled

their service, their duration of using the service needed to exceed the duration of time

between cancellation and their acceptance to participate, with a maximum duration of six

months. As this study was exploratory in nature, participants were not screened beyond

their usage of the meal kit service. This mean that participants ranged in cooking

experience, dietary requirements, personal responsibilities, time restrictions, ‘familiarity of

service’ and so on, to enable a varied sample of insights pertaining to customer value-in-

social-context processes.

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In total, seven participants from six households were interviewed. This small sample size

was selected as it was deemed more appropriate when exploring the highly varied and

intrinsic nature of value. As the literature review demonstrates, it is not commercially

feasible for the service to attempt to accommodate individual food values on an individual

basis. This limitation was used to establish that it was not necessary (nor feasible) for this

study to identify and then measure every potential food value among the meal kit

community. As such, an in-depth exploration to understand the dynamics of participant

value creation processes was considered more appropriate for the goals of this study. It is

because of this that a small sample size was deemed more appropriate, as it allowed for a

more intensive examination (Crouch & McKenzie, 2006) of participant value creation

efforts over a week-long period. Consequently, this smaller group of participants allowed

the primary researcher to explore in detail not only participant usage of the service

throughout the week, but which other household members were involved and in what

capacity, and (importantly) affiliated attitudes and goals towards each activity throughout

the process.

In its final form, the cognitive map was conducted on an A1 sized piece of butcher’s paper

with a horizontal line spanning its length. The line on the A1 sheet was used to represent a

timeline of the user’s weekly process using the meal kit. The images generated from the

participant’s response to the cultural probe were placed from left to right to represent this

to the participant. This was done so that the participant associated the A1 sheet as a

timeline, and to apply this temporal nature to the activity being performed by describing

their weekly events in sequence of each other. These images were not permanently fixed

to the A1 sheet so that participants could adjust the images to accurately represent their

stages of process. If the participant had quit using the meal kit service, they were

presented with two timelines. The top timeline represented their current process, which

was where their cultural probe responses were placed, and the lower timeline was

provided for the participant to describe their past processes using the meal kit.

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The prompt deck was placed adjacent to the cognitive map, but used blue post it notes to

segment the images and words into ‘actions’, ‘objects’, ‘places’, ‘interactions’, ‘people’ and

‘feelings’ categories, and improve visibility for the participant. Participants were requested

to conduct the exercise in the room where the participant ate dinner, such as on a dinner

table or in the living room (Figure 8). This was to first ease the participant by having them

in a familiar place. This was also another method of improving participant recall by

conducting the exercise in the location the context in focus occurs. Only participants 2 and

5 performed the cognitive map exercise outside of their households, and this was instead

performed at the university campus.

The cognitive map activity started by describing the purpose of the activity, what the

activity consisted of, and the purpose of the prompt cards. Participants were then asked to

start from the first image they provided from the cultural probe (‘Who ordered the meal kit

and where?’). From here, probing questions were asked. While questions were prepared in

the discussion guide, the questions asked during the exercise were generally reactionary in

response to participant statements or themes mentioned by the participant. If the

participant had stopped or fell short describing an element of their process, the questions

in the discussion guide were used to further prompt the discussion. As participants

described their activities, they were encouraged to add images that they felt represented

the theme as well. This was useful in uncovering user moods and perspectives towards the

Figure 8 Setup of cognitive map exercise

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routines they described. The primary researcher would also draw on the A1 butcher’s

paper to draw connections or causations when appropriate (Figure 9).

While the interview was structured to discuss the user’s process chronologically, the

flexible and visual nature of the exercise aided participant recall in several ways. First, it

allowed the participant to jump between descriptions of their weekly process as they

recalled them during the exercise. Secondly, it aided the participant when describing how

disparate events were in some ways connected. Thirdly, the visual timeline was useful to

refer to at the end of a participant’s train of thought, reminding them of the original stage

being discussed and move the conversation onto the next stage. Towards the end of the

interview, the participant was asked to identify what they considered to be moments in

their week that informed the rest of their process and describe why. An interview was

considered complete after the participant felt they had sufficiently described their weekly

process using the timeline. The cognitive map exercise conducted with each participant

took on average an hour, within a range of 42 minutes and 80 minutes.

3.4 Instruments for analysis 3.4.1 Dataset 1: Mind map images and words

Figure 9 Completed cognitive map exercise

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When developing the prompt cards for the cognitive map activity, images and words

generated by the mind map exercise were printed off and then grouped via Kimbell’s

(2014) AEIOU framework (Figure 10). This framework was adapted to represent the

elements that are influence practices.

Figure 10 Kimbell's (2014) AEIOU framework

When attempting to identify values and perceptions, the category of ‘feelings’ was added.

This group was added as suggested by Sanders and William (2003), and contained emotive

prompts. During the pilot studies, the prompt cards used were tallied based on their use.

Cards that were hardly being used were removed from the deck.

3.4.2 Dataset 2: The cognitive map

An affinity diagram was used to analyse participant responses and identify participant VISC

processes (Holtzblatt & Beyer, 2015; Martin & Hanington, 2012). Prior to the analysis

process, participant data was first transformed into practice cards. To do this, audio

recordings from the cognitive map were first transcribed and coded by the primary

researcher. Originally, participant transcripts were coded via the Kimbell's (2014) AEIOU

framework, however this coding scheme disassociated the relationships between elements

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of participant responses too much (see Appendix E). From here, the coding scheme was

modified to capture the activities performed by a household member, which network

members were involved, and attitudes attributed to a certain activity (Figure 11). This

approach was found to better reflected the CSEP archetypes (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015).

Furthermore, each AEIOU element could be divided into a respective practice archetype

(i.e. users and interactions are representative of normalizing practices). The transcript

codes were originally segmented and written onto post-it notes (participants 1 and 2) (see

Appendix E), but was then digitised by transferring the transcript codes into a Microsoft

word table in an A4 document. These activities were then compiled into a dedicated cell

within a Microsoft Word table (see Appendix E). The table in this Microsoft Word

document was then printed, where each cell was individually cut out to form a practice

card. Each practice card contained a corresponding participant and transcript code number.

This was to ensure that the information on an activity card could be quickly clarified by the

participant’s original statement within the transcript (Figure 11)

The practice cards were grouped into specific clusters that represented holistic stages in

Figure 11 Example of printed activity cards used for affinity diagram

Figure 12 Affinity diagram for participants 6 and 7

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the participant’s process (e.g. checking fridge, collecting family member weight, looking at

upcoming recipes all represented ‘meal planning’) (Figure 12). The benefit of the affinity

diagram process was that these practices cards could be easily grouped then reshuffled,

which enabled an themes to be rapidly identified and then evaluated (Sleeswijk Visser et

al., 2005). This enabled themes to be assessed, challenged and retested before finalising

where each action fitted within the individual’s VISC process, and how these actions and

associated perceptions were interrelated (e.g. waiting for a partner before cooking).

Through the affinity diagram, two hierarchies of the participant process were created. An

overarching hierarchy was developed that segmented the results into five broad dinner

stages. This was used to keep the analysis consistent across the seven participants. These

stages were developed after finding similar functions in each participant’s process. They

were planning, which consisted of participants thinking about, and then deciding about

meals and ingredients for the week’s series of dinners; unpacking, which consisted of

getting the produce/ingredients from an agent to the house; preparation, which

considered the activities conducted and triggers prior to cooking; cooking, which was

considered when someone in the household began to start organising that dinner’s

ingredients; and then dinner, which included both the consumption of the meal and the

peripheral cooking activities conducted immediately after (e.g. cleaning). Dinner also

included alternative actions to the meal kit service or personal cooking, such as ordering or

eating a meal another agent has prepared (e.g. fast food). Within these five broad dinner

stages, the second hierarchy described activity clusters that were specific to each

participant’s processes within the broader five dinner stages (e.g. Participant 5 weighing

her family in the planning dinner stage to determine what the upcoming dinners will be).

Once the arrangement of the practice cards were finalised, McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and

Ferrier’s (2015) CSEP model was used to synthesise the practices. Each activity cluster in

the affinity diagram was dissected and allocated a specific type of CSEP practice within

either the representational, normalizing or exchange practice typologies. Ellway and Dean’s

(2015) cyclical description of the value creation process was used to inform analytical rules

that distinguished how the CSEP practices identified in the findings correlated with each

other. As value creation activities are an amalgamation of these three interrelated practices

archetypes (Ellway & Dean, 2015; McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015), after the practices were

identified within an activity their relationship and functional characteristics were finally

grouped into a ‘practice chain’ (Figure 13). As such, each activity cluster was considered to

consist of at least one representational, normalizing and exchange practice necessary for

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performing that action. This analytical process was performed manually in a book and then

later transferred to a digital version (see appendix F).

4. Results 4.1 Introduction

Figure 13 Practice chain structure

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Seven participants from six households conducted the cognitive mapping exercise. With

regard to the demographics of these households, three households had young children,

two households consisted of young couples both working full-time, and one household

consisted of two sisters living together with a roommate. The duration of use between

participants also varied, with two households having used the service for less than three

months, two households using the service for more than 18 months, and two households

recently cancelling their subscription. Figure 14 Participant household composition

represents the member distribution of each household, as well as their representative

codes. Their involvement in the cooking process is symbolic of how often the member wold

contribute to the specific cooking process of routine meals.

Figure 14 Participant household composition

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While synthesising participant data through the affinity diagram, five major stages emerged

that were representative of each household’s overarching cooking routine. These stages

are described as: planning, where participants would determine what the upcoming week’s

meals would consist of; unpacking, where participants would source the ingredients

necessary for their week’s meals; preparation, which consisted of the participants

afternoon routines prior to starting that nights meal; cooking, which was the specific

actions performed to create that night’s meal; and dinner, which comprised of the actions

performed while consuming the meal, in addition to activities that occurring immediately

after dinner (e.g. cleaning). This final dinner stage also represented participant actions of

sourcing food from alternative agents (e.g. fast food and restaurants).

It was identified that all participants using the meal kit performed these five dinner stages

in the sequence presented. For those that had quit the service, it was identified that they

continued to perform the same activities within these 5 dinner stages, however their

planning activities were conducted simultaneously within both the unpacking and

preparation stages (i.e. participants would plan what to personally cook upon arriving

home). By grouping the results into these five stages, a comparison between participant

processes was much easier. This approach also provided a more concise idea of how

previous events would inform later stages of the dinner process (i.e. poor planning and

routine shopping habits resulted in forced repetition). As such, the following section will be

divided into these five dinner stages. Within these five stages, actions or values shared

among participants will then be presented.

4.2 Planning This first dinner stage is comprised of participant descriptions of how they select and each

upcoming week’s meals, and their decision-making process that determines this selection.

The synthesis of participant description led to the emergence of three themes which are:

personally planning meals, utilising the meal kit to plan meals, and attitudes towards the

service’s provision of meals.

4.2.1 Personally planning meals All participants interviewed for this study were found to be the household meal planner

when the meal kit was not used. Unlike the meal kit service, which plans the meals a

week in advance, each participant would habitually decide what meal to cook prior to

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starting the meal preparation process. Most participants expressed that the reasoning

behind this process was because they did not enjoy searching for meals, and therefore

lowered its priority in relation to other responsibilities. A shared attitude towards meal

planning can be summaries by participant 5’s expression:

“Yeah, I’m not a big cook. This is probably going to add more stuff to your … I don’t like thinking about things. You tell me what to do and I’ll do it, whenever it comes to cooking. I don’t like having to think about, ‘Oh what do we have to eat

for dinner tonight.’ ”. (Participant 5)

But this spontaneous approach to meal planning meant that a participant’s selection of

meal for dinner was then dictated by the ingredients already within their household,

ultimately limiting their ability to explore new meals. Participant 4 expressed a desire to

cook vegetarian meals, but despite his confidence in his cooking ability, he felt that his

lack of planning prior to grocery shopping meant that he would not have the ingredients

necessary to experiment with a new meal. When asked why he hasn’t attempted to

implement more planning prior to grocery shopping, he expressed:

“One reason is just lack of organisation, and laziness. If I am to cook vegetarian meals, I need to go and look up vegetarian meals, I don’t just sort of know ...

about what, what, what’s a good vegetarian meal or a fish meal.” (Participant 4)

To reduce the effort associated with meal planning, participants would occasionally use a

resource such as a website (participants 1, 3 and 4), cook book (ptn 4), or an older recipe

card (participants 2, 4, 5, 6) from a previous meal kit. In participant 3’s case, she utilised

the suggestions of market vendors to select new ingredients, how to cook them, and

what meals they should be used in:

“[Market vendor]’ll recommend things, so I’m quite open to, ‘Oh, ok, yeah I’ll try that,’ and she’ll say, ‘You can slow roast that on – or that’ll

be really nice if you put some you know, something herb with it.’ So, and I’ll do the same at the fruit and veg [stall], when I go along to the fruit

and veg, and ask, ‘What’s good?’, and the ladies there’ll be like, ‘Oh, this is what you need, you need some of these this week, these are really nice this week.’ So I do shop very much, and I think I’ve got a trusting

relationship with the people that I buy from.” (Participant 3)

Combined, these participant perspectives towards the act of planning meals for their

household demonstrate the task is highly undesired, and held a lower priority in relation to

other weekly activities and responsibilities.

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4.2.2 Utilising the meal kit to plan meals The attitudes towards personally planning meals contrasted severely with the insertion of

the meal kit into the household, as all participants expressed appreciation when role of

meal planner was adopted by the meal kit service. The most commonly shared benefit

participants attributed to the use of the meal kit was its ability to reduce the amount of

planning required, an activity each participant held a strong disinterest in conducting.

Participant 6 sums up their attitudes:

“For me, it’s really about convenience. Um, and about avoiding going to the grocery store, and, uhhh yeah, just that decision fatigue and

deciding what to eat and it’s, they [meal kit meal] always taste yummy ... But I find as well, like, in a way, you’re paying almost … um, I don’t

know, you’re paying for the luxury to bypass the grocery shopping and all the impulse buying you would have done.” (Participant 6)

Using the meal kit, the participants’ meal planning activities were generally limited to

looking at the upcoming week’s recipes on the meal kit website to assess their

appropriateness for the household. Provided that household preferences or routines

weren’t challenged, this greatly reduced degree of involvement, and was highly desired and

appreciated by all participants.

4.2.3 Attitudes towards service’s meal selection

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When participants were asked about their lack of control over the meals selected by the

meal kit, opinions varied. When asked about meal variety, participant 1 combined the card

‘something different’ adjacent to a picture she took of an empty bowl from a dinner (Figure

15). While doing this, participant 1 explained that the meal kit’s meal variety allows her to

try new meals, stating that she feels the meal kit has only repeated meals three or four

times over the year. But when asked about her feelings towards the specific meals selected

in relation to what she would choose to cook, she stated she would ‘get excited for meals,

or not excited for some, but then again, it’s a subscription box’.

Participants 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 on the other hand expressed a great joy (Figure 16) in the

discovery of new meals When asked about her thoughts on the varied cuisines selected by

the meal kit, participant 2 stated:

“Yeah, it is different. I wouldn’t automatically choose the things that they’re giving us, but I like the fact that it’s encouraging me to do that,

Figure 15 Participant 1’s response to service’s selection of meals.

Figure 16 (Left) Participant 5 and yng5’s feelings towards meal variety. (Right) Participant 2 uses ‘healthy bowl’ image to describe meal kit’s dinner selection.

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to try ... I didn’t realise I was doing it until we tried all those other things and I was like, ‘Oh yeah I really, I pigeonholed myself a little bit.’ ”

(Participant 2)

Even participant 7, who repeatedly stressed throughout the interview her strong

disinterest towards cooking, appreciated the meal kit’s introduction to one of her now

favourite ingredients:

“Same with that other risoni stuff. That’s cool, I like that ... That’s my new favourite thing, it’s like a pasta rice! ... It’s cool ... [laughs] I eat it and I’m like eating more than I need to and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is pasta, like it will make me fat ... I shouldn’t eat this much.’ ” (Participant 7)

Thus, not only was the meal kit mitigating planning responsibilities, but it was perceived as

an actor that brought new and interesting discoveries into household dinner processes. But

where some participants enjoyed the exploration, at times the meal kit’s forced assignment

of meals challenged preferences of the household. Participant 3 mentioned that she and

ptn3 enjoyed the activity of fishing, and so both members were highly familiar with cooking

fish. Therefore, when the meal kit service planned a fish meal, participant 3 felt that the

service’s selection of fish meals and dictation of how to them conflicted with her personal

history and preferences. But this conflict affected participant 3 so severely that she even

expressed disgust towards the service’s selection of fish meals:

“Nah, just the seafood, and then fish was on the menu again and I was like, ‘Naah’ ... and that was a bit of a real swaying thing for us because I was like ‘Well, that’s one night’s meal that we can’t eat out of the box,’

and if they’re going to keep adding fish ... and things like fish tacos, eugh ... that just ... pfft, that just doesn’t sit well with me. So, the

seafood was an issue for me, yep … No, I would never eat fish tacos ... I just don’t think the two should go together.” (Participant 3)

In conclusion, this section demonstrates that the meal kit’s adoption of a household’s meal

planning process was largely welcomed by all participants, who lacked the desire to

personally plan the meals. An added benefit as demonstrated by participants 2, 4, 5 and 7

was that, despite the decreased involvement of the meals, the added ability to explore new

meal and ingredient types was mostly appreciated. But contrary to this strong beneficial

attribute, if the service’s dictation of meals challenged the food preferences of participants,

this service was considered to be detrimental to the creation of dinner. In the most severe

example, participant 3 demonstrates that those who are highly familiar with a specific food

type may even consider the service to be conducting a poor job and consider it necessary

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to personally undertake the meal planning role again. This dynamic was identified among

other participants, and will be further discussed in the following section.

4.2.4 Contextual factors that challenge service’s meal selection

When asked about how their personal preferences were affected by the autonomous

nature of the meal kit, participants 2, 3, 4 and 5 described unique contextual factors that

limited their ability to consistently rely on the meal kit’s organisation of meals. As a result,

despite the meal kit’s highly desired adoption of meal planning responsibilities, only

participants 1, 6 and 7 felt confident in the meal kit’s ability to consistently organise their

week’s meals. Participants 2, 3, 4 and 5’s descriptions informed two types of contextual

factors that limited their ability to consistently rely on the service’s ability to plan meals.

They were a household’s weekly routines (e.g. children’s activities, work, dinner with

friends), and household dietary requirements.

When considering household routines, participant 4’s weekly dinner process varied

between ptn 4 cooking personal meals on weekends, going out for dinner, and organising

his children for their afternoon activities. When attempting to balance these factors with

the meal kit service, participant 4 found that the limited selection meal quantities offered

by the meal kit service challenged his household dinner processes:

“We didn’t get ever to choose the things we wanted to have, um, because there just weren’t spare nights, and, and quite often we

actually wouldn’t even be able to use the four meals that we got and so, we were always, you know, gave them to someone; worked out alright.”

(Participant 4)

Rather than wasting a night’s meal, participant 4 gave the extra meal kit meal to a

neighbour. But despite participant 4’s solution to ensure that nothing was wasted, his

inability to modify the number of meals delivered was a contributing factor to the

cancellation of the meal kit. Participant 1 also experienced a similar scenario where her

position as a teacher meant that she would have to mark assignments at home during the

end of semester. As she prioritises her work duties, she often feels too busy to cook even a

meal kit recipe:

“When I’m at my busiest, so if its reporting, um school reports or the end of the year reports, like now, we switch to the 3 meal box because we

found that there were a couple of nights we just weren’t cooking at all, or its wasted, so we found that we were wasting meals and having to,

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yeah, either freeze the meat or throw it away, because we just didn’t have time. So this week I’ve had two nights out and so, If I’d have got

the 5 meal box, we would have been wasting meals on those days cause yeah [ptn1] definitely wouldn’t have cooked.” (Participant 1)

But unlike participant 4, participant 1 felt that the ability to quickly modify the meal

portions delivered from five times a week to three times was of strong benefit, and

expressed a strong appreciation for the meal kit service’s flexibility.

The second contextual factor that challenged households was dietary requirements and

preferences. Both participants 2 and 5 have household factors that require them to

determine whether they can eat the ingredients provided in the upcoming meal. In

participant 2’s case, her partner is lactose intolerant and she does not enjoy eating fish. The

only solution participant 2 has identified when addressing an upcoming meal kit that

contains these ingredients is to cancel the week’s delivery and then conduct her

(undesired) personal meal planning. Participant 5 also utilises this process, describes her

scenario as:

“We’re actually a family nutrition conscious family. We do a weight-divisioned sport, which means that we need to control our weight at certain times of the year. Um, so we found [with meal kit service], we just need to change the portion sizes and it fits in with the nutrition

requirements. ... Um, with regard to planning for all of the rest, um, it’s really a week by week thing, because if the weight’s on track then we don’t really need to make a change, but if the weight’s not on track,

then um, we’ve got that week to plan and it’s ... yeah, our meals without [meal kit service] are really, boring and simple. Chicken, veg, change it

up with the herbs.” (Participant 5)

Unlike participant 2, participant 5 will do what she can to modify the portions of the meal

kit meals to meet household requirements by modifying the portions of vegetables and

protein. But if she cannot realise opportunity to do this, participant 5 will cancel that

week’s order and return to an undesired personal meal planning process. But where

participants 2 and 5 still consider the meal kit’s ingredient selection manageable,

participant 3’s lack of interest in the fish produce resulted in the cancellation of the meal

kit. This was because participant 3’s inability to change or remove the ingredient from the

rest of the meal kit delivery resulted in a decision between wasting an entire night’s meal,

or cancelling the order entirely.

When considering both types of contextual limitations of the households interviewed,

participant responses demonstrate a clear divide in the value of the meal kit service. Both

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participants 1 and 5’s ability to appropriate the meal kit’s strict provision of resources for

their personal processes left both participants maintaining strong positive associations with

the service. This contrasted drastically with both participants 2, 3 and 4, who were unable

to resolve the meal kit’s challenge in a satisfactory manner. But where participant 2

described the service only challenged her household’s dietary preferences, participants 3

and 4 found that their contextual factors were not only repeatedly challenged, but the

service’s strict provision left them feeling incapable of using the meal kit’s resources. This

combination of challenged contextual factors in conjunction with their inability to modify

the resources provided is used to infer one of the predominant reasons why both

participants 3 and 4 have cancelled their subscription to the meal kit service.

4.3 Unpacking Unpacking is the second dinner stage identified, and consists of how participants organised

the ingredients for necessary for their weekly cooking process. Participants’ descriptions of

how they sourced their weekly ingredients in this stage resulted in two main themes: how

the meal kit is delivered, and how appropriate the meal kit’s ingredients are for household

requirements and personal grocery shopping.

4.3.1 How is the meal kit delivered? The first process discussed revolved around using the meal kit’s home delivery feature.

Much like the opinions held towards the service’s meal planning role, participants still using

the service expressed a positive attitude towards the meal kit’s home delivery feature and

the degree of flexibility it offered. It was a common delight among participants to perform

unrelated personal processes (e.g. sleeping, working), and then to magically receive a

selection of ingredients at their front door. When describing this delight, participant 2

attributes the meal kit’s adoption of grocery shopping tasks with an increase in time that

she can instead spend bonding with her partner:

“Yeah, well I guess this part, like one of the things this has done for us is give us more time, and we’re spending less time grocery shopping and things like that. Well with our more time, we should spend more time

together.” (Participant 2)

But much like the meal planning, this delivery process was challenged by a participant’s

contextual factors. Participant 2 used an image of a ‘praying dog’ (Figure 17) to represent

her anxiety over the potential theft of the meal kit due to the open layout of her house and

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its adjacency to a busy street. Furthermore, the front is unshaded, which leaves her

questioning how safe it would be to leave her ingredients out in the sun while working.

Participant 5 also described a situation in which her dog would bark at the delivery man in

the early hours of the morning during the delivery. But unlike the limitations of meal

planning, both participants greatly appreciated the greater degree of control over how the

meal kit is delivered. In both cases, participants could rearrange the delivery time to ensure

it is more appropriate for their house (e.g. participant 2 has the meal kit delivered early in

the morning before work; participant 5 has it delivered during the day so the dog doesn’t

wake up the neighbourhood).

Participant 6 appreciated the home delivery, as she lives on the second floor of an

apartment block (Figure 18). But in the past (with both her current and previous meal kit

services) participant 6 encountered the occasional delivery dilemma where the meal kit is

delivered to the wrong area. When participant 6 could not find the meal kit at her

doorstep, she assumed it had failed to be delivered until discovering the meal kit the next

day after being exposed to the elements. Despite this failed delivery, participant 6 felt that

her vegetarian preferences meant that the meal kit consisted of ingredients that did not

perish as easily, and she instead appraised the meal kit’s insulation, as her ingredients were

still slightly cold upon discovery the next day. While participant 6 was not explicit about

why these delivery mistakes occasionally happen, a conclusion for her leniency towards

these delivery problems may be a result of both the satisfactory condition of her

Figure 17 Participant 2’s pictorial response when describing her attitudes towards meal kit delivery

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ingredients upon discovery, in addition to her second-storey apartment location, which

features many adjacent ‘front doors’. This observation was made when the primary

researcher visited her place of residence to conduct the cognitive map activity.

Once the meal kit made it into the house, participants 1, 2, 5 and 6 described similar

processes of how they also made it their specific duty to unpack the meal kit and transfer

the ingredients into the fridge. Participants 2, 5 and 6’s reasoning for conducting this task

was motivated by two reasons. This activity first allowed these participants to confirm that

the all ingredients required for that week’s meals were delivered and suitable for

consumption. During this activity, the meal kit’s recipe card functioned as a checklist

(Figure 19). The second reason was that meal kit ingredients were stocked in specific

locations within the fridge for symbolic purposes. Participants 1, 2, 5 and 6 used the

shelving space in both their fridge and pantry to demonstrate to both themselves and other

household members what ingredients what were for specific dinners, and what could be

casually eaten.

Figure 18 Participant 6’s cultural probe response to ‘Where is the meal kit delivered?’

Figure 19 Both participant 5’s (left) and participant 2’s (right) describe unpacking the meal kit with the checklist icon.

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The final theme commonly mentioned by participants pertaining to the service’s delivery

centred around the packaging that the produce and recipe cards was sent in. Participants 2,

6 and 7 all expressed a desire for the meal kit to manage the wasted packaging rather than

leaving the onus on them:

“Yeah, cause we end up with so many boxes, cause they deliver a brand new box every week and I thought we put out our old box and collect it

and then swap it over, but it just has to go into recycling. And all the cool packs as well, I know they can be recycled but it just seems like a lot

of stuff every single week, whereas I’d love to just swap it over.” (Participant 2)

“The box. I feel, I feel like they used to collect it and they used to recycle it. It would be awesome if they still did that … ’cause it’s a pain for us to have it … and … um, it makes you feel like you’re doing the right thing by

recycling it.” (Participant 7)

But participant 6 utilised two strategies to reduce excess packaging. The first consisted of

using the cardboard box to collect their recycling underneath the sink, although participant

6 stated that they had stopped doing this because it both took up too much space, and it

looked ‘ugly’ in the kitchen. Participant 6’s second strategy consisted of using the packaging

insulation as growth media for her veggie patch. Participant 7 acknowledged that she was

impressed with her sister’s creative efforts to manage the wasted product.

In conclusion, participant opinions of the home delivery feature of the meal kit were

generally positive. A familiar problem among participants was how their house/apartment

would occasionally challenge how the meal kit was delivered, which would occasionally

result in a soggy or missing meal kit. Despite the occasional shortcomings of the delivery

feature, no participants blamed the service. Instead, participants generally considered the

delivery problem to be caused by their location (e.g. participant 5’s dog, participant 6’s

large apartment complex). Opinions were generally positive, as participants felt that the

service provided sufficient options to modify the service’s delivery to an appropriate

degree that resolved most of their concerns (e.g. participant 2 reducing the chance of theft

with a midnight delivery, participant 5 changing the delivery time to stop her dog barking in

the early morning). The only problem solely attributed to how the meal kit was delivered

was identified by participants 2, 6 and 7, who all felt the meal kit packaging was excessive.

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4.3.2 How appropriate are the ingredients the meal kit selects?

Participant evaluations of the produce sent by the meal kit was generally positive.

Participant 2 did claim that the produce was occasionally ‘nobbly’ or damaged, but felt that

this contributed to the produce being ‘organic’ (Figure 20). Another negative perception

towards the meal kit’s provision of ingredients was that participant 2 felt the ‘expected

ingredients’ (i.e. staples the participant has to organise) requested by the meal kit weren’t

commonplace within her household, and wished the meal kit sent them.

The only problem encountered with the produce severe enough to warrant the service’s

cancellation occurred with participant 3, as the meal kit’s suggested fish meals already did

not align with participant 3’s household’s preferences. This conflict was further

exacerbated after what she described as the ‘fish incident’:

“We didn’t like the fish, and um, we looked at the fish in the packet, and we went ‘salmon ... ok ...’ and we were like ‘... give it the benefit of the doubt, we’re pretty spoilt and lived up north, we’ve cooked lots of fish

for ourselves’, and we were like, ‘Nah, we can do this’. And [ptn3] opened the fish up, I could smell the fish from the other end of the bench ... he put his finger into the fish and his fingerprint stayed in the fish, and

he was like, ‘Uuh, so I’m going to cook it ...’ and I was like ‘... alright’.

Figure 20 Participant 3 uses farmer to demonstrate organic perception towards produce

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And it just smelt ... who knows, maybe that’s what it was meant to ...? I mean well in my mind if you press ... you shouldn’t be able to smell it, and it should bounce back when you press a piece of fish ... Um. So we

really did, we were like, ‘Oooh,’ we were trying to hide it from the children too that we weren’t impressed. We didn’t want them to feed off

of our ... um, very high standard of fish that we like.” (Participant 3)

Furthermore, this negative experience formed a basis of doubt around services ability to

source the correct produce:

“I did say that we didn’t like the fish and I um, googled, it wasn’t salmon, it was pink ling, yeah, and I googled. I think we might have had

salmon as well but I googled ‘pink ling’ , and I was like ‘I don’t know what pink ling is, I’ve never heard of pink ling,’ and I googled that while

[ptn3] was cooking, which was probably the worst thing I could have done because it’s not a fish, it’s an eel. And, obviously it gets used a lot

and it’s a commercial fish and all the rest of it, but for me, this did not ... my brain was not accepting that I was going to eat an eel for dinner ... I

don’t care what they call it ...” (Participant 3)

Thus, the combination of unfamiliar meals planned by the meal kit in addition to the lost

faith in the service’s ability to source the correct produce meant that participant 3 wanted

to cancel all future fish meals created by the meal kit. But her inability to remove individual

meals from the rest of the meal kit formed participant 3’s justification to cancel the meal

kit service, despite her appreciation of the other types of meals provided.

In conclusion, all participants except participant 3 and ptn 4, greatly appreciated the

service’s adoption of the highly undesired grocery shopping task. Furthermore, participants

1, 2, 5, 6 and 7 greatly appreciated the opportunity to discover new ingredients through

the service, which they felt wasn’t likely to happen through their personal processes. While

most of participants considered the ingredient defects as characteristics of organic

produce, participant 3 and prtn 3 felt the meal kit service was incapable of organising

ingredients to the level of quality they desired. Furthermore, their lack of control over

resolving the challenging ingredient subsequently resulted in participant 3’s cancellation of

the service.

4.3.3 How are personal ingredients organised? Participant attitudes towards their personal shopping processes contrasted greatly in

comparison to the meal kit service. Most participants held a strong negative association to

grocery shopping and expressed a desire for the removal of this process. Participants 1, 2

and 6 all used negative icons during the interview to demonstrate their hatred of the

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process (Figure 21). But as previously discussed, participants disinterest in planning

upcoming meals impacted the grocery shopping as well. When organising the ingredients

for the households, the household’s meals, instead of actively planning around specific

meals, participants would routinely purchase staple ingredients. This poor planning prior to

grocery shopping also left participants purchasing products that they did not need.

Participants 1, 2, 6 and 7 used the ‘empty wallet’ image to express that after replacing their

personal grocery shopping activities with the meal kit, they were reducing unnecessary

purchases and saving money.

Participants 4, 5, 6 and 7 conducted additional processes that simplify their remaining

grocery requirements not managed by the meal kit service. Participants 4 and 5 both use

Coles’ online ‘Click and Collect’ service to organise their remaining grocery shopping.

Similar to participant’s routine ingredient selection process discussed in Section 4.2.1,

participants 4 and 5 mitigate their routine meal planning processes by automatically

ordering staple ingredients with a digital grocery list they generated with the service.

Participant 4 only modifies this list after discovering a new meal or ingredient of interest.

They will then simply collect the grocery items from a designated fridge on their commute

home after work. While participant 6 conducts much of the grocery shopping, both she and

participant 7 will minimise their grocery shopping activities by sharing the responsibility

through spontaneous collaboration. If either participant 6 or 7 realise an ingredient is

needed prior to cooking, they will notify the member (via call or text) who is out conducting

a personal activity to collect the missing ingredient before coming home.

Figure 21 Participant 6’s (Left) and participant 1’s (Middle) attitudes towards grocery shopping, and participant 2’s (Right) elimination of grocery shopping

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Only participant 3 held a positive association with the process of grocery shopping. This

conclusion can be made because when conducting the cultural probe, she responded with

six images of her grocery shopping process (Figure 22) when the activity asked for only one.

Throughout the interview, participant 3 elaborated on both the quality of the produce and

the friendly nature of her relationships with the farmer’s market vendors. Participant 3

selected the ‘conversation’ image card to describe her grocery shopping process (Figure

22). Participant 3 further detailed that her exchange with the vendors of a local farmer’s

market was not only friendly, but informative:

“[Market vendor]’ll recommend things, so I’m quite open to, ‘Oh, ok, yeah I’ll try that,’ and she’ll say, ‘You can slow roast that on – or that’ll

be really nice if you put some you know, something herb with it.’ So, and I’ll do the same at the fruit and veg [stall], when I go along to the fruit

and veg, and ask ‘What’s good?’, and the ladies there’ll be like, ‘Oh, this is what you need, you need some of these this week, these are really nice this week’ . So I do shop very much, and I think I’ve got a trusting

relationship with the people that I buy from.” (Participant 3)

Figure 22 Participant 3’s grocery shopping process with farmers market vendors

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This interaction was predominant influence that encouraged her to explore new

ingredients, recipes and cooking methods. Participant 3’s grocery activities were a

collaborative effort within her family, as each member was involved in selecting specific

ingredients for that week’s grocery shop. But if an ingredient was forgotten, ptn 3 will grab

the missing ingredient(s) after work as he’s closer to the city. Participant 3 does not like the

traditional supermarket chains, as she feels the price and quality of their produce doesn’t

compare to her farmers markets.

This examination demonstrates that much like meal planning, the activity of grocery

shopping was highly undesired by all participants apart from participant 3. Participants 1, 2,

4, 5, 6 and 7 made attempts to reduce the effort required by conducting routine purchased

which negatively impacted their enjoyment of dinner, as they frequently repeated meals.

Furthermore, these participants would attempt to conduct grocery shopping activities after

work, which left them feeling tired or annoyed. Participant 3’s demonstrated pleasure in

conducting the grocery shopping is attributed to the relationships she has with the farmer’s

market vendors. This relationship was highly beneficial, as participant 3 was consequently

able to discuss and negotiate with the market vendors in a friendly manner, what

ingredients were appropriate for her household, in addition to discovering new and

unexpected meals based on their conversation. This can be used to infer why participant 3

felt that this method had surpassed the capabilities of the meal kit service, while the other

participants preferred the meal kit service.

4.4 Preparation The preparation dinner stage was considered the activities performed prior to starting the

cooking process. This actions and perceptions attributed with this dinner stage were

predominantly conducted in between arriving home from work and starting the cooking

process. Participant descriptions resulted in two themes for this dinner stage, which are

afternoon routines, and determining who cooks in the household.

4.4.1 Afternoon routines For those cooking without the meal kit, participants typically decided what form dinner will

take during this preparation dinner stage. Participants mentioned the intensity of their

day’s events would dictate whether to cook a regular meal, a meal kit meal, a ‘lazy meal’,

or even order dinner from restaurant or fast food chain. Participants 1, 2 and 6 all

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described feelings of displeasure when thinking about the time between finishing work and

starting to organise dinner. Participant 4 and 5 also expressed feeling time poor during this

stage as they had to simultaneously organise their family members’ personal activities

while determining what’s for dinner. Participant 4 states:

“I get home and uh, 5 o’clock, or, 5.30, and then I start thinking about dinner... or tomorrow I’m going to get home at 6, and you know, it’s just difficult to do different things ... so I won’t get to do this [cook dinner] till

ah, 6 o’clock and it’s just easy to do things that I know how to do.” (Participant 4)

This is indicative of how contextual priorities within this dinner stage shaped the

participants’ subsequent processes and attitudes towards cooking. This form of cooking will

be described as ‘routine’, where the meal’s recurring but vital creation was considered

highly undesired in relation to other recent contextual events or priorities. Unlike the

inspired cooking endeavours that would be performed on the weekend (participants 1, 2

and ptn 4), the conflicting contextual priorities within this stage would be used to suggest

why participants considered the subsequent cooking task as a chore that simply had to be

completed.

When considering participant perceptions of the services application during non-routine

meals, responses were not as positive. Participant 4’s feelings towards the meal kit’s

application were mixed during this stage. As highlighted in the planning dinner stage,

participant 4 greatly appreciated using the meal kit service to mitigate cooking efforts while

organising his children for their afternoon routines. However, participant 4 was not so

willing to relinquish his choice of dinner for less frantic nights. It is here that the meal kit

service challenged his preferred routines despite the reduced effort planning and

organising meals:

“We didn’t get ever to choose the things we wanted to have, because there just weren’t spare nights, and quite often we actually wouldn’t

even be able to use the four meals that we got, and so we were always, you know, [giving] them to someone.” (Participant 4)

This demonstrates that despite the convenience, the service’s predefined number of

dinners organised did not compare to participant 4’s more cherished personal dinner

routines.

In conclusion, these descriptions are used to first distinguish the differences between

routine and desired cooking. This differentiation can be used to demonstrate how the meal

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kit was appropriate for the routine mode of use. However, as demonstrated by participants

1, 2, 3, 4 and ptn4, when a participant was not conducting this routine type of cooking the

meal kit service was considered more of a hindrance.

4.4.2 Determining who cooks in the household All participants explained how they would determine who will cook that night’s meal during

afternoon routines, and then attempt to distribute that role with varying degrees of

success. Three different processes were used by participants when assigning cooking

responsibilities within their respective households.

i. Dominant cooking role in the household:

The first process, described by participants 1 and 4, is where a single member of the

household was primarily in charge of cooking the meal. Participant 1’s reasoning as to why

she’s the predominant cook was:

“It’s just more of an effort for me to clean up afterwards, and yeah. So it’s probably more my control, why [ptn 1] doesn’t cook, but he gets

home later than I do, and he studies [university]. So when he gets home, he generally goes into the study and you know, does his thing, does

assignments, and listens to lectures and things like that. It’s easy enough that I can cook, because I probably would end up being home an

hour before him, so it’s not as big of a deal for me to just go, ‘Alright, well I’ll stop planning for an hour and go and cook dinner.’ So, yeah, it’s partly me being absolutely anal about [cleaning], and then yeah, some of him; just he’s strapped for time as well and his times pretty precious

while he’s still finishing uni.” (Participant 1)

P4 is also the predominant cook within his household. His reasoning as to why is:

“I do most of the cooking in the household, but [ptn 4] is a very good cook. Very good and very enthusiastic. She enjoys cooking and she’s … very concerned about what she’s producing at the end ... [ptn 4] cooks twice a week probably, 2 or 3 times a week? ... She’s meant to have,

meant to work 4 days a week, not 5, and I think today is her day off, but this is a pretty typical day off as she gets home at 7 o’clock at night … so

we, it does tend to be more round the weekends or holidays that she would cook.” (Participant 4)

While participant 4 has made attempts to include his children in the process, this was not

happening frequently, as his kids are ‘not interested’. Participant 4 admitted that his efforts

to get his children to cook were greatly enhanced when the meal kit was being used.

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ii. Negotiating the cooking role in the household:

Elements of the meal kit were used by participants to assign roles to other household

members. Participant 7 acknowledges that while participant 6 is the predominant

household cook (Figure 23), participant 7 states that she will occasionally cook simpler

service meals when P6 is busy. Thus, the simpler meals of the service allow participants 6

and 7 to use their absence to inform a dynamic cooking roster:

Participant 7: “We don’t have a really, a formal roster, you know.”

Participant 6: “And sometimes like, we know we have some different activities that we might know about. So usually on a Wednesday night I’ll go to a friend’s house, I didn’t this week, and I was doing running on Mondays – Monday nights, umm, and then [Participant 7] might have

exercise some nights and yeah.”

Participant 7: “If, like I know she’s gone on running group or something, I’ll typically start dinner.”

P5 conducts a similar process within her household, where the role of household cook alternates between herself, ptn 5 and eld5. When asked how they conduct this process, P5 said:

“So with [meal kit service], I literally just come home at the end of the day and my husband and the 16-year-old, are, have already been home

Figure 23 Participant 7 uses the "my sis rocks" card to describe Participant 6’s predominant cooking activities

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from school or work and they’ve left to go to training. And they pick out a recipe, and they leave the recipe card on the kitchen bench, and that is

the recipe I cook for that night.” (Participant 5)

This is process is utilised so that each the household member can alternate between cooking and attending training. Finally, it was also discovered that the meal kit recipe card was implemented as a tool to assign cooking responsibilities. Participant 4 utilised the recipe card to get his children involved in cooking:

“So ... we, you know, have a system whereby the kids make one meal each, every week. Now ... it very rarely happens I’ve got to say, but

never the less, that is the, that’s the staging regime. And if you say like [meal kit] is very easy to do that, because you can just say, ‘Okay, you’ve got four recipes, you pick one, and tell me which day you’re going to do it,’ and so it’s uhh ... I found it quite a good thing in terms of um, getting kids involved, in the process, because then, you know, you give them the

choice without saying this is the meal I want to cook, so it gives you some sort of ownership rather than saying, ‘This is what I want you to

cook tonight.’ So that works quite well.” (Participant 4)

This use of the meal kit’s resources to motivate other household members to cook was used by participant 6, who now suggests recipes with a specific ingredient that participant 7 loves:

“Yeah, so, barley is something that I found out that I absolutely love, and every time there’s a meal with barley it’s gone. And ... or [P6] will

say, ‘Hey! this one’s got barely in it, you’ll enjoy it!’ ” (Participant 7)

Both participant 6 and 7 feel that despite participant 7’s strong disinterest in cooking, this is proving to be an effective form of motivation when encouraging cooking.

iii. Cooking collaboratively with household:

Many participants found benefit in using the meal kit service to not only to improve either

personal or household cooking frequency, but to also invite other household members into

a collaborative cooking process. Participant 2 expressed a great appreciation for the meal

kit’s lowered cooking difficulty, as it encouraged her partner to engage in a hobby she

thoroughly enjoys by:

“No, just association with food for the both of us is just much more positive. I mean I’ve always been really super interested and like to

watch the cooking shows and everything like that, meanwhile [ptn 2]’s not that interested. And it’s nice for him ... it’s nice for me to see him

interested in something I’m interested in. And that’s a nice little incidental. But yeah, it’s good, it’s working out well for us.” (Participant

2)

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Consequently, participant 2 expressed feeling much less time poor as her afternoon routine

now consists of procrastinating on her phone (Figure 24) as she waits for her partner to

arrive home before cooking the meal kit meal together. Participant 3’s household also

cooks collaboratively but without the assistance of a meal kit. While participant 3 and ptn 3

are the predominant cooks (i.e. they typically select the meal) in the household, where eld3

and yng3 will perform minor cooking tasks (cooks rice, makes a sauce, etc.). This process is

important to participant 3, as she sees the collaborative cooking process as a routine task

that provides an opportunity to bond with her household.

In conclusion, these three methods of organising the household cooking demonstrates that

the meal kit’s lowered difficulty not only makes it easier for participants to personally cook

routine meals, but also enhances their ability to distribute a predominant cooking task

among their network.

Figure 24 Participant 2's description of her afternoon routine

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4.5 Cooking The cooking dinner stage was defined as either the participant’s or another household

member’s utilisation of ingredients and skillset to create a single night’s dinner. Participant

descriptions of this dinner stage resulted in the emergence of three themes, which were

cooking personal meals, using the meal kit to cook, and modifying the meal kit.

4.5.1 Cooking personal meals As previously mentioned, the minimal planning and reliance on routine grocery purchases

left participants generally deciding what was being created that night only prior to starting

the actual cooking process. This meant that meal choice was primarily determined by what

ingredients were already in the fridge. The types of meals selected by participants varied

depending on their cooking ability, interest and how time poor they felt. When discussing

participant perceptions of ability when cooking without the meal kit, most participants

described themselves as competent. Only participants 5, 7 and ptn 2 were exceptions, who

instead felt they were only moderately successful in their attempts. When discussing

participant attitudes towards cooking non-routine meals, participant responses were much

more varied. Participants 1, 2, 3 and ptn 4 enjoyed the creativity and freedom associated

with cooking personal meals. These same participants also described experiencing no

difficulties exploring and attempting new meals, with the only limiting factor being the

ingredients they had available within their fridge. Participant 2, for instance, relishes the

opportunity to spontaneously experiment:

“It depends on how tired I am, but yeah I really like cooking and when I have all the ingredients for things I like to try new stuff and I’ll go for

weeks where I just cook every single night, and then go through weeks where [ptn 2]’s travelling, or had a bad week at work, and that’s when I’ll start doing a bit of takeaway and stuff like that. But I love cooking, the biggest thing for me is not having the ingredients.” (Participant 2)

Participant 3 is also used to this spontaneous approach in her cooking:

“Often I’ll just google search. So, like that pork rack, I’ll google ‘pork rack’ and ‘taste’ will come up, Taste.com.au and I found that they have really good recipes. I don’t tend to go onto any of those forum’y, people who’ve got their own recipes, because they’re not tried and tested and I just don’t really, don’t really rely on them. Or if I need to, um, like, ‘How

do I slow roast something?’, or some technique that somebodies mentioned to me at like the market. ‘You could braise that’ ‘Oh but how do you braise that?’, so I would just google that, but that would, umm,

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I’m not going to spend any more than 5 minutes looking for a recipe.” (Participant 3)

Participant 4 instead saw cooking as a chore despite perceiving himself to have a strong

cooking ability. As previously discussed, the planning activities required to organise new

meal types held a lower priority in relation to participant 4’s other contextual priorities.

Despite a desire to experiment and a strong cooking ability, participant 4 found difficulty in

trying new meals.

Unlike the previous participants, participants 5 and 7 were not so confident in their cooking

ability. Participant 5’s perceived low cooking ability and sparse meal planning is what she

felt caused her to create either unhealthy or bland dinners, which left her feeling

conflicted:

“Yes, so before starting [meal kit service], we, the training schedule was essentially the same, um ... and the planning, there was zero planning, so I would get home, on a Monday afternoon, after no, um ... with the

six-year-old, and have no idea what to cook, not have any idea what’s in the fridge, have no, plan and then we’d end up eating, terrible food, or ... the same old ... boring stuff. And even before [meal kit service], I was

not using anywhere near as much herbs or sauces or marinades or whatever, as what I am using now. I was too afraid.” (Participant 5)

Participant 7 was explicit throughout the interview about her disinterest in cooking by

repeatedly declaring the fact. Her primary reasoning for this disinterest was that she’s she

doesn’t want to prioritise more than 30 minutes on a meal. Because of this, she tended to

repeat a small selection of very basic meals such as burritos and spaghetti prior to the meal

kit service, much to participant 6’s displeasure.

These insights surrounding personal cooking ability first demonstrate that the meal kit is

used irrespective of cooking ability, although those with a lower cooking ability do

appreciate the new avenues it presents. Participants with a higher cooking ability all

expressed a preference for experimenting and trialling their personal meals when they

were not feeling time poor. As such, they preferred the freedom to explore and did not

consider the meal kit appropriate for this process. This finding suggests why the meal kit

service is associated with cooking routine meals.

4.5.2 Cooking with the meal kit When discussing perceptions of using the meal kit in their cooking process, participants

primarily welcomed the involvement of the service, provided the service meals delivered

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were appropriate for their household requirements. Participants who felt confident in their

cooking ability would often modify or ignore the recipe’s instruction in favour of conducting

their personal process. Participants 1 and 2 described the meal kit’s suggested cooking

process as ‘utensil heavy’, and would instead modify the process to reduce the amount of

cleaning at the end. When asked about his attitudes towards using the meal kit to cook

routine meals, participant 4 stated:

“If it was just [ptn 4] and I, I wouldn’t do [meal kit service] either, because then we would just be doing some more interesting things with

food. Well I regard [meal kit service] as a very easy, bit like fast food almost. You know, it’s an easy and convenient thing to be doing …”

(Participant 4)

But when asking the same question of participants who were not so confident in their

cooking ability, they expressed enjoyment of utilising the meal kit’s suggestions during the

cooking process. Both participants 5 and 7 also attributed the meal kit with an increase in

their personal cooking abilities after being exposed to new ingredients to experiment with.

Participant 7 attributes the meal kit with introducing her to one of her now favourite

ingredients, risoni, which (based on participant 6’s suggestion) is now used to motivate her

to cook it. Participant 5 described that the specific ingredients provided by the meal kit in

conjunction with the recipe forced her to learn about new ingredients in a way that was

not possible through her personal processes:

“Since having [meal kit], I have increased my ability to cook massively. Like it’s been a massive improvement. I’m not afraid to put herbs, put

sauces, mix different types of food with other types of food which I would have never thought to do. Um, when you read off I guess a recipe book, or you know, a piece of paper from the internet, without actually forcefully having the ingredients put in front of you, I guess you’ve got the option to not buy the ingredient that stays on the recipe card and therefore you don’t put that ingredient in your cooking, whereas here,

it’s physically in your hand, it’s right in front of you as you’re cooking, so you may as well put in the recipe when it tells you to. So I’ve expanded

on my cooking ability.” (Participant 5)

Because of this learning process, participant 5 believes she has matched (or potentially

surpassed) her partner in cooking ability, which she took great pleasure in stating. Further

examples of this forced experimentation were found when cooking fish. Much like

participant 2, participant 5 has never enjoyed cooking fish, so when one meal contained

fish she was tempted to replace it with chicken. But where participant 5 differed from

participant 2 is that, despite her personal preferences, participant 5 trusted the meal kit’s

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suggestion enough to attempt to cook the fish, which she is happy she did because she was

very satisfied with the results.

Thus, based on participant responses, cooking ability infers their degree of willingness to

experiment with the meal kit. Those who feel less confident in their ability are more likely

to appreciate being forced to trial new ingredients (participants 5 and 7). This is greatly

contrasted by those with a higher cooking ability who prefer to personally conduct the

experimentation themselves, and consider the meal kit’s suggestion as limited (participants

1, 3 and 4). Furthermore, this suggests that the predominant benefit affiliated with the

meal kit’s use does not lie in the cooking stage, but through mitigating the planning and

grocery stages as previously mentioned.

4.5.3 Modifying the meal kit As previously mentioned, the meals provided by the meal kit were not always appropriate

for the household, but some participants were found to implement strategies that made

the service more appropriate for their household. When managing undesired ingredients, a

basic strategy commonly used by participants would be to cook the conflicting ingredient,

but then either serve that portion to a family member less averse to it. Otherwise, the

ingredient was just wasted, but most participants (participants 1, 2, 4, 5, 6) expressed a

strong desire not to do this.

Another common strategy used by participants was to modify the portion size of the meal

by adding personal ingredients. This was conducted frequently by participant 5, who

needed to adapt the meal kit portion sizes to household’s weight targets necessary for

their competitive sport. Participants 1, 2, 6 and 7 described using the meal kit to modify

their personal processes outside of dinner. These participants felt that the meal kit’s

portion sizes were too large for dinner, and would use what was remaining for lunch the

next day. Participants 6 and 7 felt that this unexpected attribute has saved them a fair

amount of money, as both have stopped purchasing lunches from work.

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Another modification to the service seen among participants was in reaction to the

previously mentioned preference not to waste unused ingredients. To resolve this conflict,

participants would implement excess meal kit ingredients in either personal or other meal

kit meals. Participants 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7 stated that the meal kit will provide an entire clove of

garlic, but its recipes don’t utilise nearly as much. As a result, these participants are

attempting to manage the gradual collection of garlic cloves within their fridge on a weekly

basis (Figure 25). Participant 1 resolves this meal kit problem by implementing the

ingredient into her personal meals, whereas participants 2, 5, 6 and 7 will just implement it

in future service meals.

These participant-motivated modifications demonstrate how the service’s challenge of

household preferences and requirements, while occasionally frustrating, are not

necessarily catastrophic for the service. Instead, these contributions demonstrate that

participants are malleable in their response as they draw on personal skills and knowledge

to ensure that the meal kit aligns with their personal values and contextual factors (e.g. not

wasting food, saving money).

4.6 Dinner This final dinner stage was defined as both the actions and interactions that occurred

during the consumption of a meal. These actions did not necessarily have to be conducted

with the meal kit service, but also included both commercial restaurants and personal

meals. Finally, activities that were performed soon after the act of dinner and were related

(e.g. cleaning dishes, taking out trash) were also implemented into this dinner stage.

Figure 25 (from left to right) Participant 1, 2 and 6’s cultural probe response to “What is the Food Service providing too much of?”

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Participant descriptions of how they conducted and consumed dinner led to the emergence

of three themes relating to their processes: regular dinners where the household consumes

either a personal or service meal; dinners with friends or family that are external to the

immediate household network; and a final scenario performed by parents where the meal

kit was used to change the behaviours of other network members.

4.6.1 Regular dinner process Participants 1, 2, 3 and 4 emphasised the importance of eating dinner collectively with their

family at the dinner table. Each participant described how the meal played an important

part in facilitating a conversation with household members and discussing family events

and achievements (Figure 26Error! Reference source not found.). When asked about the

importance of the meal, participant 4 stated:

“It’s for, having something central and you know, same with food. Food is a … uh, you know, one of the bits of collateral that uh, you use you

know. And you have a, some sort of regime and regularity and you have food, and you know, nice food is, is certainly part of it, but it’s not, it’s, it’s, you sit down together not for the sake of being able to appreciate the nice food, but um, to be able to interact with each other, and the

nice food just … makes it … more, a more enjoyable process.” (Participant 4)

Unlike participants 3 and, 4 who predominantly used dinner as a premise to connect with

their young family, participants 1 and 2 dinner location would alternate between the

dinner table and the couch in front of the TV. Participant 1 demonstrates this process with

the ‘ironing board dinner’ card placed adjacent to her cultural probe image of ptn 1 at the

Figure 26 Participant 3’s (Left) cultural probe response to ‘What does a successful meal look like?’ and participant 4’s (Right) usage of the conversation card in conjunction with dinner images to describe his dinner process.

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dinner table (Figure 27). Participant 2 responded to the cultural probe’s ‘Where is dinner

eaten?’ in a similar fashion with a picture of ptn 2 on the couch (Figure 27).

But participant 2’s perceived quality of the meal kit was used to motivate a change in her

normal dinner process. Participant 2 considered the service’s meals to more extravagant

than her personal meals. This justified why they should be eaten at the dinner table,

consequently fostering the process of eating and conversing with her partner. While this

perception of quality wasn’t shared by participant 1, she did emphasise how the meal kit’s

reduction in effort left her feeling less ‘shattered’ after cooking, which left her motivated to

sit and converse with her partner at the dinner table.

Participants 5, 6 and 7 differed from these participants, as they all ate the majority of their

meals on the couch in front of the TV. Participant 5 used the ‘guy on phone’ image (Figure

28) to describe their routine dinner process was more akin to an unwinding process than

bonding. When describing their household dining room, participants 5, 6 and 7 also felt

that their dinner table was too small and cluttered, which further justified why dinner

wasn’t normally performed at the table (Figure 28).

Figure 27 Participant 1’s (Left) and 2’s (Right) response to dinner activities.

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When considering how these participants performed their routine dinner with the meal kit,

participants 1 and 2 demonstrate using the service as justification to change their routine

behaviours from eating in front of a couch and instead connect with their respective

partners. In this sense, the meal kit service is already being used to achieve social values.

But outside of this application, the value of the service within participant processes is more

varied. While participants 3 and 4 utilise the meal as justification to connect with their

young children, the meal is only the means to an end. Both participants 3 and 4 state that a

delicious meal helps, but it is not necessary for this interaction to occur. Finally, articipants

5, 6 and 7 maintain their routine perspectives of food, and more closely consider it simply

as an act of nourishment. It is for this reason why it can be inferred why their value of the

emal kit service comes from the creation of hte meal, more so than it’s role in dinner.

4.6.2 Dinner with extended family and friends When it came to bonding with extended family members or friends over dinner, all

participants preferred to place cooking responsibilities onto an external agent (e.g.

restaurant, takeaway food). Participant 5 described a family ritual that occurred after

family members’ competition, with the household collectively choosing a restaurant to ‘pig

out’ at and celebrate. When describing this process, participant 5 used a combination of

images that represented shared eating, fast food restaurants, and ‘eating fast food in front

of a laptop’ (Figure 29). In contrast to the casual nature of their routine dinner processes,

dinner after a competition is considered as the main event for them to connect as a family.

Figure 28 Participants 5 (left), 6 and 7’s (right) description of their dinner activities

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Participants 1, 2, 4 and 7 also mentioned that they preferred to socialise with

friends/colleagues/extended family at a restaurant rather than cooking a meal. This

response was the same when asked about catering for a larger group of friends and family

(Figure 30).

Participant 1 expressed that she would prefer to select a personal meal for a larger group,

whereas participant 2 was more open to this idea despite being conflicted as to whether

Figure 29 Participant 5's description of household dinner after a competition

Figure 30 Participant 7 prefers to get dinner with friends.

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she would cook a personal meal or modify the meal kit. Participant 2 did describe a

scenario where she increased the portion size of a service meal to accommodate two extra

servings for her parents. Participant 5 felt that she could modify the meal kit to cook for

larger groups and regaled how it would improve her standard ‘sausage and bread’

hospitality. Only participant 3 described cooking for individuals external to her immediate

household, where she would occasionally cook for her daughter’s friends and parents when

they visit.

In summary, the meal kit service was not really considered as a tool to cook for larger

groups of people, although participants 2 and 5 were able to realise the potential of doing

so by modifying the portion size. Participants 1 and 3 instead inferred that while they do

not cook for large groups often, they would rather personally select a meal to cook for

these groups. But these processes are considered unlikely, as all participants expressed

how they preferred to interact with these extended groups in a restaurant or diner as

opposed to cooking for them.

4.6.3 Convincing others to eat The final theme identified surrounding the meal kit’s role in a participant’s dinner process

was demonstrated through participants with young children. The meal kit’s pre-selection of

ingredients without little affordance for changes resulted in a popular strategy used by

participants to motivate their children to try new meals and ingredients. Participants 3 and

4 described moments where this function of the meal kit was used to simultaneously

explore new meals while not being perceived as the villain of the household.

“Lack of enthusiasm from my children is, is the main reason ... they’re quiet enough about it but they turn up their nose at vegetarian meals,

and you know ... they tend to turn their nose up at anything that’s new, and that was one of the great things about having the vegetarian for

[meal kit service] I think, that you know, ‘That’s what we were having,’ and so they tried it.” (Participant 4)

“But [meal kit service] did that to us as well, so, it was, I found it exciting to look at the recipes for the week and think, um, and having teenage girls who, one is a little bit fussy, and I think at the time, I said, ‘This is what we’re doing,’ and they seemed pretty keen about it. Umm, and they, I said, ‘Just gotta give it a go, you know. Like, let’s try that,’ you know, cause they might have turned their nose up a bit at particular, something that we hadn’t had before, and, my youngest who is fussy, she, she just had such a good attitude towards trying these new foods,

in these recipes and things like that.” (Participant 3)

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While it was not specific to the consumption of the meal, participant 5 also found benefit in

utilising the meal kit to encourage yng5 in performing her afternoon routines and not

harass participant 5 about being hungry, thus giving participant 5 time to cook and prepare

the meal in peace. This was done by presenting the recipe card to yng5 and demonstrating

how long the meal would cook. Participant 5 described:

“Now, even though [meal kit service] takes obviously longer than two minutes to cook, [yng5] can see it cooking and she can see the end

picture on the recipe cards I guess and she can see, how long it’s going to take and she’s quite happy to … wait for her food now. Um, so that’s

really interesting.” (Participant 5)

This final theme demonstrates how parents found opportunities through the meal kit’s

resources to negate aspects of dinner that were normally challenged by their children. In

doing so, these participants found new value in the service’s ability to trial more

experimental and interesting food types while utilising the service as a scapegoat for their

children. This final theme also presents a unique scenario where the meal kit’s challenge of

household preferences is accepted and valued, provided that the participant’s food values

are still being achieved.

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5. Findings 5.1 Introduction With the participant descriptions collected through the cognitive mapping exercise, their

responses then had to be converted into a data set that could assist the meal kit service in

establishing where it fits in relation to unique social food values of its users. Therefore,

participant descriptions of their weekly dinner processes were coded and then collated

through an affinity diagram. This diagram demonstrated clusters of participant actions at

various stages in their weekly dinner process. The customer service experience practices

(CSEP) framework was then applied to these action clusters, where their descriptions were

compared and then affiliated with its specific practice type. Ellway and Dean’s (2015)

cyclical description of value was used to inform the sequence each practice archetypes was

performed, and how they related to each other. This was used to inform a series of practice

chains, which were used as representations of specific VISC processes of each participant.

The following sections extrapolate these processes to demonstrate the nuanced yet vital

role a meal kit plays in each participant’s enactment of dinner and experiences (Edvardsson

et al., 2011).

Section 5.2 discusses the predominant role that participants attributed to the meal kit

service and why. Akaka et al.’s (2014) description of symbols in value co-creation will be

used in conjunction with the CSEP practices identified to infer why the participants

attributed a similar expected role of the meal kit. This section will then elaborate on this

finding and use the CSEP analysis to infer what parts of the service’s function limit its ability

to absolutely fulfil this role.

Section 5.3 explores the unique applications of the meal kit by individual participants, and

infers how the service was utilised by participants to realise their social food values. This

exploration of which clarifies how each participant’s specific contextual factors would

influence how they perceived and subsequently implemented the meal kit’s resources.

From this observation, this section concludes with the proposition that participants

attempted to use the meal kit’s resources beyond its primary focus of health, convenience

and cooking ability, and to realise other intrinsic social values attributed to dinner.

Section 5.4 explores in further detail the modifications each participant applied to the meal

kit through the CSEP practices to understand how they were implemented. This section

then utilises additional value co-creation concepts to clarify what determined the

successful or failed application of meal kit resources to achieve these social dimensions of

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food security. This consequently demonstrates how meal kit customers are capable actors

that can organise other actors and collaborate on a solution encountered with the service.

Section 5.5 discusses the discovery that the meal kit’s applicability during each participants’

creation dinner and realisation of their social food values was determined by the

participant’s network. This section utilises the CSEP interaction practice archetype with

Lusch & Nambisan’s (2015) notion of resource platforms and resource densities to frame

participants attempts to resolve the shortcomings of the service. This amalgamation of

service science theories in conjunction with the CSEP practices observed are then used to

propose that participants will perform a specific series of interactions with their immediate

network to align the meal kit’s resources with their needs (and subsequent social values

attributed to dinner).

5.2 Co-creating value with the meal kit service When discussing meal planning, participants described how their contextual requirements

(e.g. work, family routines, etc.) motivated their reasoning to lower the priority of

organising and cooking routine meals. Because of this, participants appreciated transferring

their assigned meal planning responsibilities for the household (i.e. assimilating practices)

to the meal kit, enabling them to simply follow the instructions of the service (i.e.

producing practices) (Figure 31).

This suggests that participants are willing, to a degree, to change personal behaviours and

routines to accommodate a process that grants them access to what they identify as a

highly beneficial set of resources. Participants 1, 4, 5, 6’s reasoning for these changes in

routine was predominantly because following the meal kit service’s suggestion mitigated

Figure 31 Planning meals through the meal kit service

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most of the effort attributed with their undesired routine meal planning processes.

Furthermore, the meal kit’s performance of these accounting practices exceeded

expectations of participants 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7, as it led to the discovery of new ingredients

and flavours, which was highly valued.

When considering why all participants associated the meal kit with this predominant role of

meal planning and grocery responsibilities, Akaka et al.’s (2014) symbols explain this

phenomenon. The meal kit’s online promotion of pre-planned meals (i.e. ‘home cooking

made easy!’, ‘home delivered with simple instructions’) suggests to the viewer that the

service exists to perform their meal planning responsibilities (See appendix G). Participants

therefore use these symbols to formulate an expectation of function in relation to other

network actors during their VISC process (Edvardsson et al., 2011), and subsequently

attribute the meal kit service with the responsibility of planning and collecting ingredients

for meals that are easy to cook.

But participant disinterest in routine cooking did not necessarily mean that cooking was an

unenjoyable activity. Participants 1, 2 and 3 described personal bursts of motivation to trial

new meals, attributing this type of cooking with pleasure. If an upcoming dinner held

significance (participants 1, 3), the participant was not experiencing time pressures

(participant 1), or had experienced a burst of inspiration (participant 2), participants

preferred retaining control over the cooking activity when creating the meal. Only

participants 5 and 7 felt that the service’s meals were sufficient when for cooking for

friends or family, while participant 2 was undecided. This more valued form of cooking

suggests that an individual’s degree of cooking ability combined with the importance of the

upcoming meal will determine whether the meal kit is used. This demonstrates a pattern

where the significance of the upcoming dinner event will determine whether participants

prefer conducting assimilating practices and dictating what form the meal takes, rather

than performing producing practices and passively following the meal kit service’s

instruction. These initial observations demonstrate that the meal kit service is not being

implemented by participants to engage in these more valued cooking creations. Sanders &

Stappers’ (2008) levels of creativity explain this scenario by demonstrating that those who

are both motivated and proficient enough to cook are likely to feel more fulfilled relying on

their personal capabilities to create a new dish, rather than following the meal kit’s

instruction. It is for this reason that the meal kit’s maximum provision of five dinners is a

beneficial function, as it provides a tolerance that participants use to implement their less

frequent but highly valued personal dinner activities. As such, the services partial

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accommodation of weekly dinners proves advantageous in assisting participants to realise

their social dimensions of food security.

When considering the appropriateness of the service’s selection of meals, participants 1, 6

and 7 expressed no severe dietary restrictions or preferences. Because of this, these

participants would only engage with the service out of curiosity by searching (i.e.

accounting practice) the meal kit service’s website (i.e. linking practice) for the upcoming

week’s meals. Because of these low food requirements, it is considered that these

participants (1, 6 and 7) are experiencing food security as their physical, economic and

social dimensions of food security’s access, utilisation and stability (Clay, 2002) are being

met. This conclusion is informed by their continued confidence in the service’s ability to

continually provide healthy, appropriate meals that that do not challenge their

preferences. Furthermore, the service’s ability to correctly accommodate these dimensions

can also be used to infer why these participants 1, 6 and 7 have utilised the service for

more than 1.5 years.

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But for participants 2, 3 and 4, despite enjoying the reduced meal planning and grocery

shopping, the service’s failure to consider their dietary or scheduling requirements meant

that they could not to confidently rely on the service to plan appropriate meals each week.

This occasional challenge to these participants’ utilisation pillar of food security resulted in

the subsequent failure to satisfy the stability pillar, thereby challenging participant food

security (Upton et al., 2016). But these challenges did not necessarily end in the

cancellation of the service. Instead, these remaining participants all described personal

efforts to resolve the shortcomings of the meal kit and achieve their utilisation and stability

pillars of food security. One such resolution participants 2, 3, 4 and 5 adapted was the

implementation of a new but less involved household role that this study will refer to as

the ‘meal guardian’ (Figure 32). Sections 4.2.2 and 4.2.4 demonstrate that participants

would take it upon themselves to conduct a small preliminary search (i.e. accounting

practices) of the upcoming week’s service meals to determine if what was being planned

was appropriate for the household’s routines or diet (i.e. evaluating practices). After this

quick search, the ‘meal guardian’ would decide whether to place the order or cancel that

week’s delivery and personally conduct the meal planning process for a week.

This examination of participant applications of the service reinforces and then extends

upon this study’s initial hypothesis that the meal kit effectively addresses the physical

dimensions of food security. It does so by first demonstrating how participants utilise

symbols (Akaka et al., 2014) to attribute the meal kit’s role with the expectation that it will

perform their meal planning processes. This study then deconstructs the specific functions

attributed to the meal kit service role through the CSEP framework. This analysis of

participant processes and subsequent discovery of the guardian role also inform that,

despite the service’s strong ability to address the physical dimensions of access and

utilisation, the service’s success is dependent on the meals it selects and whether they are

Figure 32 The meal guardian role

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appropriate for the individual’s network. The individual’s determination of these food

requirements is identified in the evaluation practices performed prior to ordering the meal

kit. But the participants’ strong disinterest in performing the accounting practices affiliated

with routine meal planning suggests that participants are willing to compromise their

personal methods to ensure the meal kit’s continued use, provided that the ingredients

selected do not drastically challenge their network. As such, the evaluation practices

performed by the ‘meal guardians’ provide a point of reference in determining how the

service’s value proposition impedes a customer’s ability to use its resources.

For service designers and the meal kit service, this demonstrates that while the meal kit

may not entirely align with the desired process of participants, its resolution of highly

undesired tasks means that those using the service are more likely to make concessions in

their personal value creation process. This notion is echoed by participant 4, who feels that

his cancellation of the service is only temporary, provided he can convince the rest of his

network into using the meal kit service again. This suggests that the an individual’s VISC

process is malleable, and that the potential benefits attributed with the meal kit persuade

the user to implement changes in their personal process to better accommodate service

resources and achieve equilibrium during the co-creation of value (Storbacka et al., 2015).

This dynamic is promising for the meal kit service as it demonstrates that it is possible to

accommodate unique customer food values on a commercially viable scale. Chapter 6 will

discuss in further detail how participants evolved the meal kit’s application to not only

ensure its continued use for routine dinners, but to also create new value outside of its

originally perceived purpose.

5.3 Changing household roles with the meal kit While the previous section discusses how participants used value co-creation symbols to

attribute a predominant purpose to the service during dinner (Akaka et al., 2014), this

section will discuss how participants unexpectedly utilised the meal kit to modify the social

dynamics within their network. Throughout the various cooking stages, participants utilised

the meal kit beyond the previously discussed meal planner and grocer role to realise

unique social values attributed to their specific dinner. Participants 2 and 4 found that the

meal kit’s lowered cooking difficulty meant that the creation of dinner was no longer

limited by skillset. This transformed what was originally an assimilated role into one that

was distributed among the household. Extending beyond the specific role of household

cook, participants found other opportunities throughout the five dinner stages to utilise the

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meal kit and modify network roles and functions. These adaptations were observed in

attempts to convince household members to trial new foods (participants 3, 4 and 5),

cooking for friends rather instead of eating out (participants 2, 5 and 7) and managing

particular children (participants 3, 4 and 5). This demonstrated that, while the meal kit

naturally accommodated food security’s physical dimensions of utilisation (Cawthorn &

Hoffman, 2015), it was the participants that would personally realise their social food

values through the service’s resources. This alteration with the meal kit’s resources

correlates with Frow et al.’s (2014) fourth premise that value propositions will evolve to

reflect the nature of a network it resides within.

An analysis of participant reconfiguration of meal kit resources through CSEP’s

representational practices (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015) informed two methods used by

the participant to change their network’s function. Participants 2 and 3 used the meal kit’s

reduced cooking difficulty to engage other household members in collaborative cooking

processes, subsequently converting the meal kit into a pseudo couples/family cooking

class. In these scenarios, participants used the meal kit not only to mitigate the undesired,

singular responsibility of household cook (i.e. transferral from assimilating to producing

practices), but also to engage with family members (i.e. bonding practices) in conversation

(i.e. play practices) through cooking (i.e. appreciating practices). In essence, participants 2

and 3 converted a mundane process into one that is highly valued (Figure 33).

These producing practices infer a link between the meal kit’s usage and the realisation of

social food values. The play practices highlighted in participants 2 and 3’s description in

Section 4.4.2 demonstrate that the meal kit not only enhanced physical access by reducing

the exertion of cooking, but also greatly increased the individual’s social dimension of

utilisation. This is because the act of communal cooking naturally encourages interactions

between those involved which consequently encourages bonding (Daniels et al., 2012). This

Figure 33 Collaborative cooking

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is embodied in participant 2’s delighted expression that she must now wait for her partner

to arrive home before cooking due to his excitement to cook with her. Even outside of the

literal act of cooking, participants 1 and 2’s perceived quality of the service’s meals is used

as justification to eat dinner with their respective partners and converse (play practices) at

the dining table, rather than their original routine of eating in front of the TV.

The second type of representational practices performed when changing the meal kit’s

function was personalizing practices. Participants identified performing personalizing

described using the meal kit’s resources in authoritative ways to reassign cooking

responsibilities to other network members. One demonstration of personalizing practices

was identified in frequent parenting tactic identified in Section 4.6.3, where participants 3,

4 and 5 realised that the meal kit’s recipe cards served as a tool for assigning cooking

responsibilities to their children. The pre-organised ingredients combined with the recipe

card’s simple instructions meant that the participant could easily demonstrate the

transferral of household cooking responsibilities by simply handing the recipe card (i.e.

classifying practices) to the child/household member (Figure 34). This transferral of cooking

responsibilities is another demonstration of social food values being achieved, as Daniels et

al. (2012) identified the act as socially important experience among families. This is because

the act of teaching a child to cook can engender gestures of care and nurture for the

parents while also encouraging sensations of independence and responsibility for the child

(Simmons & Chapman, 2012). Finally, the meal kit’s ability to facilitate this assignment of

roles is considered to directly benefit the food literacy of children. Simmons and Chapman

(2012) state that learning to cook in a home environment with their parents is quite

beneficial for improving and sustaining a child’s healthy food behaviours and knowledge.

This assignment of cooking roles was even utilised to a similar degree by participants 5 and

6. Both participants attributed the meal kit the ability to perform more valued social

Figure 34 Dictating cooking roles

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activities (participant 5’s competitive sport and participant 6’s running). The ability to

reliably distribute cooking responsibilities to other household members meant that both

participants could return home to a cooked meal after performing their desired social

activity. This enhanced reliance on new actors through personalizing practices could be

considered as improvements to both the physical and social dimensions of food security’s

access and utilisation (Cawthorn & Hoffman, 2015). This is because participants 5 and 6

maintain their access to nutritious food but not at the cost of their more valued social

activities.

Frow et al.’s (2014) fourth premise that a value proposition’s resources will evolve through

use explains why meal kit users were observed modifying the meal kit to better

accommodate their intrinsic food values and subsequently achieve food security. Through

the extended use of the meal kit the individual will learn from their experiences, and may

identify new opportunities in a service’s resources specific to address other contextual

factors (Ellway & Dean, 2015). As a participant endeavours to realise their social

dimensions of food security, these new applications of meal kit resources subsequently

inspire new symbols associated with the meal kit (Akaka et al., 2014; Ellway & Dean, 2015;

Frow et al., 2014). As such, the meal kit’s purpose evolves beyond meal planning and

grocery shopping, and is also considered a family cooking roster (participants 3, 4, 5 and 6),

a fun date activity (participant 2) or culinary scapegoat (participant 4).

While the previous section utilises CSEP practices and symbols to demonstrate why

participants predominantly associated the meal kit with meal planning responsibilities, this

section utilises the same theories in conjunction with other SDL frameworks to

demonstrate how unique participant applications of the meal kit emerged. Consequently,

these unique applications of the meal kit were identified as participant attempts to adapt

the meal kit’s resources to personally realise contextually specific social food values; i.e.

teaching their children to cook, using the perceived quality of meal to justify eating

together at the table. This dynamic is beneficial for the firm, as it establishes that the meal

kit does not necessarily have to tailor the service to reflect the varying social values that its

customers attribute to food (Beardsworth & Keil, 1997; Costa, Schoolmeester, Dekker, &

Jongen, 2007; Daniels et al., 2012). But participants 3 and 4’s termination of the service

demonstrates that the user may not always be able to implement service resources.

Therefore, the following section will explore the participant-informed modifications of the

service to understand their motivations and how change was achieved.

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5.4 Customer-driven modifications and when the service breaks

The previous sections utilised Akaka et al.’s (2014) notion of symbols to establish the most

commonly identified purpose participants attributed to the meal kit, as well as participants

also adapting the meal kit resources beyond its original symbol of convenience and health

to achieve their personal food values and therefore realise the social dimensions of food

security. This extends on the previous examples of user attempts to realise social values by

demonstrating how participants resolved problems encountered with the service to ensure

its continued use. Throughout the five dinner stages of the results, participants

implemented methods to tweak the meal kit to align with other social attitudes relative to

their dinner process. The following examples (Figure 35, Figure 36, Figure 37) demonstrate

a pattern of modification after participants encountered a problem with either the meal

kit’s resources or the means in which they were provided (i.e. linking practices).

Participants would take it upon themselves (i.e. assimilating practices) to organise the

resources of other network actors, and determine and enact a solution (evaluation and

appreciating) so that the meal kit resources could still be utilised for their cooking process.

Figure 35 Managing meal kit packaging wastage

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This evolution the service’s purpose and how it is performed through CSEP is reinforced by

the fourth experience and learning stage of the VIU cycle (Ellway & Dean, 2015). In these

scenarios, the participant performs assimilating practices as they are assessing their

contextual factors (e.g. picky children, desire to bond with partner), and using their past

experiences with the meal kit to measure and inform new ways its resources could be used

to address other social desires (e.g. lowered cooking skills needed, service’s selection of

meals as a means of experimenting). This notion of learning and adapting a value

proposition through use demonstrates on a micro scale a mechanism Frow et al.’s (2014)

notion that value propositions are reciprocally co-created upon application within a

network.

But where the previous examples demonstrate how participants identified solutions that

addressed the shortcomings of the linking practices performed with the meal kit,

participants 3 and 4’s inability to resolve challenges that emerged from the meal kit

resources proved catastrophic for the service’s success. Participant 4’s description of his

afternoon routine within Section 4.4.1 demonstrates how the service’s strict catering for

Figure 37 Managing excess ingredients Figure 36 Modifying meal kit portion sizes

Figure 38 Managing an undesired service meal

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only two or four nights forced participant 4 to frequently choose between cancelling social

dinner plans with friends and colleagues, or wasting a service meal. Despite participant 4’s

partial resolution of gifting the extra meal to his neighbour (i.e. bridging practices), he felt

that this process was not beneficial, as this challenge was repeated every week (Figure 38).

Similarly, participant 3 cancelled her meal kit subscription because the selection of fish

produce repeatedly challenged her household preferences (Figure 39). Despite being

satisfied with the other meal types provided, her inability to remove fish ingredients left

her with the decision to either waste a night’s meal or cancel the week’s delivery entirely.

When considering participants 3 and 4’s motivations for cancelling the meal kit service, this

eventuated because the meal kit’s resources and the way in which they were provided

challenged their VISC processes while also leaving the participants little opportunity to

personally modify the resources towards a resolution.

So despite both participant 3 and 4 expecting the meal kit to accurately perform their meal

planning responsibilities, its lack of sympathy towards household food preferences or

dinner routines meant that the service was incapable of providing organised dinners that

were appropriate for each household. As the meal kit continued to challenge participants 3

and 4’s respective dinner processes though its rigid service provision (i.e. linking practices),

it can be inferred that the meal kit was not sufficiently performing its affiliated network

role (Edvardsson et al., 2011). Consequently, the meal kit’s continued inability to fulfil this

role in addition to its frequent contestation of household preferences resulted in a

misalignment of value and the subsequent collapse of participants 3 and 4’s respective

networks (Frow et al., 2014). As equilibrium can only be achieved once the offending actors

Figure 39 Managing undesired service ingredients

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are removed from the network (Frow et al., 2014), this clarifies why the meal kit service

was cancelled by participants 3 and 4 despite enjoying other aspects of the service.

These observed participant modifications to the meal kit’s value proposition through CSEP

highlight network functions vital to participant VISC processes during dinner. Section 5.2

demonstrates that all participants considered the meal kit’s adoption of meal planning

activities as beneficial for their personal processes, and suggests why most of the

participants appreciated the meal kit service despite also encountering various challenges

through its use. However, after contrasting these insights with participants 3 and 4’s

cancellation of the service, this identified that the service’s rigid method of resource

provision not only challenged their existing network dynamics (Frow et al., 2014), but also

deterred them from implementing satisfactory resolutions with the assistance of other

network members. This resulted in a scenario where participants 3 and 4’s food values

were continually challenged, but their lack of power to resolve the problem left them little

choice other than to cancel the service (Storbacka et al., 2015). With the concept of food

security considered (Clay, 2002), this also demonstrates that irrespective of the meal kit’s

ability to strongly address the physical characteristics of utilisation and access, the social

dimensions of utilisation (e.g. household allergies, dinners with friends) negate this benefit.

What this implies for the meal kit is that its difficulties do not solely lie in the resource

composition of its value proposition, but that it also must consider how its provision of

these resources align with the role its users have attributed to it (Frow et al., 2014). From a

co-creative lens, this implies that the method in which the resources are accessed is equally

as important as the resource composition of the meal kit, as the means in which resources

are utilised subsequently determines the fulfilment or failure of a service’s expected

network role. Therefore, the next section will demonstrate how the firm can analyse and

consider a means of provision to enhance value co-creation and ultimately improve the

resiliency of the meal kit.

5.5 The evolution of the meal kit’s value proposition

Section 5.2 demonstrates how the predominant role and function attributed to the meal kit

by participants were originally shaped by the symbols advertised by the firm (Akaka et al.,

2014). However, the previously discussed Sections 5.3 and 5.4 use participant descriptions

of their continued use of the meal kit to demonstrate attempts to manipulate its function

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so that it aligns with their VISC processes. This observation reinforces Frow et al.’s (2014)

proposal that value propositions evolve among the network they exist within.

However, the analysis of these modifications to the meal kit value proposition through

McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) normalizing practices demonstrate that

participants would align the meal kit’s resources (i.e. linking practices) to their VISC

processes by drawing on the resources of other immediate network actors. For example,

participants 1 and 2 mitigated any undesired ingredients by allocating them to their

respective partners; participant 5 used her personal dietary knowledge to ensure the meal

kit’s nutritional content were appropriate for her family’s competitive sport, and so on. This

suggests that that the bonding and bridging practices performed by participants were

influential in determining the appropriateness of the meal kit’s value proposition for their

VISC.

This is further demonstrated through the processes performed by participants 3 and 4

when they encountered their respective challenges. Both participants similarly engaged in

bonding and bridging practices to resolve problems with their linking practices, with

participant 4 gifting the extra meal to his neighbour (i.e. bridging practices) and participant

3 drawing on the expertise of her partner and fishing forums (i.e. bonding and bridging

practices) to evaluate the quality of the fish ingredient. However, despite this inclusion of

external actors and their resources, these efforts were still insufficient in overcoming the

meal kit’s shortcomings. Consequently, their continued inability to appropriate the meal

kit’s resources for their VISC processes demonstrated a deterioration of their network

(Chandler & Chen, 2016), which ultimately motivated the removal (i.e. cancellation) of the

service from their network despite largely valuing its meal planning role (Frow et al., 2014).

This comparison of both successful and failed participant appropriations of the service

through CSEP, in conjunction with Lusch and Nambisan’s (2015) functional description of

service platforms suggests that a linking resolution exists. Customers choose to engage

with the meal kit’s platform because of its high resource density (Lusch & Nambisan, 2015;

McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015). However, McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015)

linking practices characterise the platform’s resource density as highly rigid in nature and

not easily changed by the individual. This dynamic is demonstrated through the meal kit’s

pre-selection and delivery of ingredients with the recipe card specifically tailored to the

ingredients selected. And so, if the customer encounters difficulties integrating the meal

kit’s resources for value co-creation, the customer’s limited ability to modify their linking

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practices will motivate them to seek alternative assistance from their context. This informs

their subsequent attempts to involve more immediate actors in their value co-creation

process (Ellway & Dean, 2015), whose resources are combined with those of the meal kit to

modify its density and potentially improve its viability for the VISC process. As bonding

practices are conducted with the most immediate and easily access actors within the

individual’s network (McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015), this suggests why participants would

primarily involve their household members in the modifications of the service when

compared to bridging practices which were determined by access to relevant groups.

With this linking resolution established, a re-analysis of Section 5.3 identifies how the

participants combined performance of linking and bonding practices improves its perceived

importance in the network, while also improving the resiliency of the value proposition

during participant value co-creation. Participant 2 and ptn 2’s agreement to eat ingredients

that the other could not greatly reduced any forced wastage by the meal kit’s selection of

ingredients. Furthermore, despite being not entirely satisfied with this solution, participant

2’s appreciation of the meal kit service from its ability to facilitate a collaborative cooking

session with ptn 2 greatly enhanced the value she attributed to the service. Another

example of this linking resolution being conducted by participants is identified in scenarios

where the individual did not want to cook the meal. Despite the meal kit’s simplification of

the dinner process, it still does not cook the meal for them, which could be interpreted as a

shortcoming of participants 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7’s linking practices when they are experiencing a

strong disinterest to cook after an exhaustive day. But participants 5 and 6 identified that

the meal kit’s simple instructions can be combined with the participant’s network members

(i.e. bonding practices) who originally may not have had the required skillset to cook

dinner. As such, the individual is combining their immediate network resources with the

meal kit’s resource density to co-create value that closely reflects the participant’s desires

(e.g. doing a social activity while still being fed afterwards).

When considering the implications of this knowledge and how it can be used in a redesign

of the meal kit service, this linking resolution clarifies how the service’s function may be

enhanced after its resources are implemented with the participant’s immediate network

during their value co-creation process. This dynamic reflects Barile et al.’s (2016) claim that

power and influence within networks are influential in the co-creation of value, and

provides a means of capturing this notion. The CSEP practice chains capture these functions

through participant descriptions of bonding and bridging practices with immediate network

members, as they attempt to mitigate their lack of control over their linking practices

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conducted with the service. Therefore, this linking resolution dynamic suggests that each

participant and their unique network composition could use the same value proposition

and implement it in ways that reflect their unique VISC process. Extending upon this, the

linking resolution alludes to why the meal kit’s role changed beyond its original meal

planning role through continued use. Lusch and Nambisan’s (2015) model can be used to

infer that this is because the resources acquired through bonding and bridging practices are

contributing and subsequently reshaping the resource density acquired through linking

practices, consequently changing the function of the meal kit. This observation aligns with

Storbacka et al.’s (2015) conclusion that ‘Customers are not to be viewed as extensions of

firms’ production processes – rather, firms need to be viewed as extensions of customer’s

value-creating processes.’ Finally, this linking resolution establishes that a solution to

designing meal kits capable of accommodating unique social food values at commercial

scales doesn’t necessarily lie in redesigning future iterations of the meal kit’s value

proposition. Instead, a solution for the meal kit service could consist of improving the

network through which the individual gathers resources, ultimately enhancing their ability

to personally realise their social values.

5.6 Conclusion This chapters analysis of participant processes with the meal kit during the fuzzy front end

(Sanders, 2013) and subsequent analysis through CSEP practices (McColl-Kennedy et al.,

2015) has provided a strong understanding of how each participant co-creates value with

the meal kit and their network.

Section 5.2 first identifies that all participants were enacting the similar CSEP practices

during the meal planning and grocery dinner stages with the meal kit. These practices, in

conjunction with participant descriptions were used to conclude that these were the most

disliked activities, and was the most commonly shared network role attributed to the meal

kit service. The concept of value co-creation symbols (Akaka et al., 2014) was used to infer

that participants all attributed the meal kit as the specific actor to address these tasks with

how it is promoted. This realisation highlights how the CSEP analysis identified the primary

purpose and function participants attributed to the service. Furthermore, the CSEP analysis

demonstrated that the service’s primary failure was an inability to accommodate

participant evaluation practices attributed with the meal planning role; these practices are

essential when organising meals appropriate for each participant’s household dietary

requirements and/or preferences. Regardless of this insensitivity, the participants’

subsequent adoption of the meal guardian role demonstrated that participants were willing

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to enact this new role as its responsibilities were much less involved when compared to

their original personal meal planning tasks. This section concludes with the notion that as

long as the meal kit continues to perform the role and activities (Edvardsson et al., 2011)

affiliated with the symbol participants attribute to it (Akaka et al., 2014), the meal kit will

continue to be considered as an essential actor in participant dinner processes.

Section 5.3 utilises both Akaka et al.’s (2014) symbols and Frow et al.’s (2014)

understanding of value propositions to reinforce the observation that participant symbols

attributed towards the meal kit evolved through continued use. This is because participants

realise new opportunities in the service’s resources when applied to their specific context

(Ellway & Dean, 2015). This unique application of meal kit resources is used to justify that

the meal kit service is in fact being utilised to achieve each participant’s specific social food

values. But despite this answering the primary research question of this study, this finding

is nuanced. This is because the service is predominantly involved in the creation of these

social values in an indirect capacity. Furthermore, a participant’s realisation of these values

is largely determined by their ability to personally identify opportunities within the

service’s resources. This section concludes in stating that the collection and potential

adoption of customer-created symbols commonly held within the community suggest

several opportunities for the meal kit to innovate its service offering.

After establishing that participant symbols towards the meal kit evolved through continued

use, Section 5.4 utilises the CSEP framework to observe how participant enacted changes

to the meal kit’s value proposition ensured that it remained appropriate for each

participant’s context. The CSEP analysis utilised in this section is then used to suggest that,

if left to their own devices, meal kit users could personally realise their specific social

dimensions of food security. This section also concludes with the insight that this dynamic

suggests the meal kit does not necessarily have to accommodate very specific dinner

processes. This demonstrates how further adoption of value co-creation presents solutions

for the meal kit service’s original predicament of addressing the uniquely informed social

values of its customers at commercial scales.

Section 5.3 concludes that a customer’s reconfiguration of the meal kit’s resources to

address their social dimensions isn’t always guaranteed, as demonstrated by participants 3

and 4, who cancelled the service. This conclusion is made after observing how the linking

practices forced upon participants 3 and 4 challenged more important social factors,

ultimately negating their ability to realise the utilisation pillar of food security. Therefore,

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Section 5.4’s compares both successful and failed participant modifications of the meal kit.

During this comparison, a repeating sequence of interactions (i.e. normalizing practices)

was identified during these modifications, which consequently informed the linking

resolution.

Section 5.5 elaborates on the previous findings through this newly considered linking

resolution to further describe this interaction mechanism during the co-creation of value.

This dynamic suggests that as participants encounter difficulties during the use of a meal

kit’s resources, they will draw on more easily accessed non-commercial resources (e.g.

family members, friends, peers). This linking resolution is then used to infer that the

resiliency of a service’s value proposition is influenced by the individual’s network

composition. This study’s exploration of both predominant and unique applications of the

service through CSEP provide, in conjunction with the linking resolution observed present

opportunities that not only benefit the commercial meal kit entity, but design and business

disciplines. As such, applications of these findings will be discussed in detail in the following

discussion chapter.

In conclusion, the exploration of these findings has resulted in two predominant findings: a

useful analytical tool for abstracting each individual’s value-in-social-context (VISC) into a

representative data set that can inform how they co-create value with their network; as

well as an interaction mechanism used by participants to personally modify the value

proposition of the meal kit. As such, Chapter 6 will discuss how these findings can be used

by service designers to develop co-creative services that better accommodate the

individual’s specific food values.

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6. Discussion 6.1 Introduction The findings establish how the CSEP practice chains can be used as an analytical tool, as

they informed what roles participants attributed to the meal kit service. Furthermore, the

analysis of participant normalizing practices during these practice chains subsequently led

to the identification of the linking resolution. This section will expand upon these two

outcomes and suggest how both can be adopted by service designers and inform future

service iterations. The following sections will be used to answer this study’s primary

research question: ‘How can value co-creation inform the design of a meal kit service

model that better accommodates its customers unique food values, while continuing its

provision at a commercial scale?’

Section 6.2 expands upon the CSEP practice chain analysis used in the findings and clarifies

how service designers can use this analysis to develop services specifically designed to

facilitate network roles. This section clarifies how the practice chains can observe the

proposed customer’s established social position and existing network roles (Edvardsson,

Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2011), and subsequently infer what role the service is expected to fulfil

during its customer’s value co-creation.

Section 6.3 expands upon the observations of the participant modifications of the meal kit,

and provides suggestions as to how a service could foster these customer-led adaptations

of the service. This section does so by using the linking resolution identified in Section 5.2.

The CSEP framework will be used to clarify the purpose and expectations attributed to the

meal kit, and to propose how the concept of symbols (Akaka et al., 2014) could be

embraced by service designers to inspire new applications of the same value proposition.

This section then conclude with why the meal kit service would benefit from implementing

these mechanisms through an online, community-led platform.

Section 6.4 concludes by considering how this study’s merger of service science and

participatory design concepts can enhance future service design processes. This section

then clarifies how CSEP and the fuzzy front end are mutually beneficial for both service

designers and service researchers. It does so by discussing contemporary service science

works and establishes how practices provide an appropriate means of informing the design

of co-creative services. This section then proposes the viability of this method in alternative

contexts, and how it could be implemented.

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6.2 Measuring for the network role attributed to the meal kit service

The findings discussed in Section 5.2 demonstrate how the practice chains can enable a

comparison of the motivations and purpose attributed to the meal kit when creating

dinner, despite each household’s uniquely determined processes. This analysis through the

CSEP practice chains can benefit service designers by abstracting the uniquely determined

processes of multiple meal kit users into a comparable data set, and subsequently frame

what shared network role(s) participants attribute to the service during their VISC

processes (Edvardsson, Tronvoll & Gruber, 2011). This section will propose how this

analytical mechanism could be used by service designers to strategically consider the

overarching network purpose and function attributed to the service that they are

designing.

When considering how practice chains can be utilised by service designers, each practice

archetype of the CSEP framework can be used to establish characteristics of the users’ VISC

process. By comparing each participant’s established dinner processes with descriptions of

their desired methods, this can subsequently inform a service designer how the meal kit

should function. As per McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) description of the

practice archetypes, the practice chain’s synthesis of participant activities can establish

their desired degree of control over the process conducted (i.e. representational practices),

who else is involved (i.e. normalizing practices), and what is the underlying purpose of the

activities performed (i.e. exchange practices); all of which are vital in understanding and

designing a value proposition that aligns with the criteria a participant uses to establish

their VISC process (Ellway & Dean, 2015).

Section 5.4’s description of Participant 3 and 4’s difficulties with the meal kit also clarify

that, while it was important that the service’s functions fulfil the participant’s exchange

practices, it was also essential that it did so in a way that reflected the participants’ desired

representational practices (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015). The comparison of

these representational practices throughout the findings suggest that they can be used to

establish the customers’ desired degree of involvement and control attributed to an

activity. For instance, Section 5.2 establishes that participants wished to distance

themselves from planning weekly dinners. Through CSEP, this signified a desire to enact

producing practices and receive assistance from the meal kit. This suggests that the

service’s active involvement is welcomed by users if it means the adoption of accounting

and evaluation exchange practices associated with meal planning. Expanding from this

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dynamic, producing practices are considered counter to assimilating practices. Participants

1, 2, 3 and 4 primarily described specific instances of assimilating practices when cooking

and experimenting with personal meals on the weekend. As such, they expressed no

interest in using service resources, instead preferring to rely on their personal capabilities.

This explicit desire to perform assimilating practices suggests that the firm should

relinquish the attributed exchange practices so that they can be performed by the

participant or their network. Otherwise, the service begins to challenge the social

positioning and balance of the network (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2011; Frow et al.,

2014) as it did with prtn4, who did not wish to relinquish the selection and creation of

dinner to the meal kit service and called for its cancellation despite participant 4’s desires.

Finally, personalizing practices were identified as the participants’ means of using the

service to assert their authority over other network members and change their behaviours.

This dynamic was identified through parents, who used the meal kit’s recipe card to assign

cooking duties to their children. Much like how participants struggled to modify the service

resources for their personal VISC processes, participants 3 and 4 identified opportunity in

this rigid delivery of recipe cards and preselected ingredients. In showing their children the

pre-organised and difficult to change resources of the meal kit (i.e. classifying practices),

they effectively embraced the service’s authority to bolster their own and subsequently

change the behaviours of their children (Frow et al., 2014; Storbacka et al., 2015).

This clarifies how representational practices can be used by service designers to clarify the

participants’ desired degree of control over their VISC process. Expanding from this practice

archetype, normalizing practices were identified as a means of understanding how other

network actors also contributed to the user’s VISC processes. This analysis through CSEP’s

normalizing practices proved particularly useful in establishing how the meal kit

simultaneously engaged with both participant and their network (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung,

& Ferrier, 2015). The results of this inquiry consequently clarified how participants would

naturally adapt the meal kit’s value proposition to fit their specific processes, as

demonstrated in in Section 5.3. The collection of normalizing practices performed during

routine processes also presents a means of designing the value proposition with the

intention of aligning with pre-established network processes (Storbacka et al., 2015). The

importance of aligning with rather than challenging these established processes is clarified

by Frow et al.’s (2014) fifth premise for value propositions, where if the service challenges

the desired functions of a network it will result in its removal from the network. This is

captured in participant 4’s cancellation of the service, where despite enjoying the assisted

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meal planning (i.e. producing practices), the meal kit’s dictation of dinner challenged

prtn4’s ability to choose what to cook (i.e. assimilating practices) and limited participant 4’s

ability to engage in his preferred afternoon routines with children and friends (i.e.

appreciating and play practices). And finally, the exchange practices proved useful in

distinguishing the underlying purpose of the participant’s efforts. To summarise, the

synthesis of participant responses into representational and normalizing archetypes proved

useful in characterising the relationship between the participant, their network and the

meal kit during each VISC process.

These abstractions of participant VISC processes through the CSEP practice chains clarify

how they can be used by service designers to inform the characteristics essential to the

service prior to the development of specific service components. As demonstrated in

sections 5.3 and 5.4, the comparison of existing CSEP practices performed by users with

their desired and imagined approaches subsequently informs what characteristics need to

be embodied by the service to correctly fulfil the network role attributed to it. Correctly

facilitating this role is highly beneficial for the service after considering the importance of

network roles and social positioning during the individual’s VISC. If the meal kit fulfils the

function attributed to it by the individual, they are likely to consider the firm as an essential

actor during their VISC (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2011). Furthermore, the

observation of existing network actions ensures that the service can be designed to align

with or extend upon these functions, therefore reducing any challenges to the established

processes within the individual’s network (Storbacka et al., 2015).

For instance, the analysis of the meal guardian through CSEP practices clarifies that it is

being performed because of the service’s failure to perform the evaluation practices

attributed to each household’s meal planning role. These evaluation practices are

necessary, as they determine the appropriate selection of ingredients for the household,

and its failure to perform them is why participant preferences were repeatedly challenged.

For the meal kit to adopt these evaluation practices, it could simply implement an online

function that customers use to flag ingredients that challenge household dietary

requirements. In response, the meal kit continues to provide its services, but may not send

any conflicting ingredients, instead placing the onus on the customer to source alternative

ingredients during their routine shops. In this scenario, the meal kit continues to perform

its valued meal planning role while ensuring that its provision doesn’t challenge participant

household requirements and wastage. Despite the customer’s additional task, the service’s

continued mitigation of the highly undesired accounting practices suggest that the service

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is still likely to be considered an essential contributor to the individual’s co-creation of

value (e.g. dinner). The firm could even enhance this service iteration by suggesting

alternative ingredients to what was cancelled (i.e. operant resources), which the customer

still personally collects. This iteration further reduces the accounting practices required

while simultaneously enhancing the customer’s meal through specialised but easily

transferrable knowledge.

This example demonstrates how the CSEP practice chains can be used by service designers

during the initial stages of the (re)design process to conceptualise the participant’s desired

degree of involvement, integrate their network, and fulfil the purpose attributed to it,

further contributing to an understanding of designing for network roles (Barile et al., 2016;

Storbacka et al., 2015; Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). This perspective of supporting existing

customer endeavours as they co-create value bears similarities with other studies, which

emphasise the notion that the firm should facilitate the customers’ predetermined

methods rather than dictating the VISC process for their customers to follow (Grönroos &

Voima, 2013; Grönroos & Gummerus, 2014; Foglieni, Villari, & Maffei, 2018; Yu & Sangiorgi,

2018). The benefit is that this is a strong contender to contributing to developing long-term

relationships with customers (Fitzpatrick et al., 2015), and may even reduce defective or

deviant co-creation (Greer, 2015; Heidenreich et al., 2015).

6.3 Customer-network-led co-creation of the meal kit

This section extends upon Section 5.4’s analyses of participant alterations to the service

through SDL concepts, and infer how a service designer could develop future service

iterations that actively embrace and encourage these personal modifications. This

exploration addresses the contemporary challenge outlined at the beginning of this study,

which was how to develop services that accommodate the unique values of its customers,

while continuing to provide the service at commercial scales.

Ellway and Dean’s (2015) cyclical stages of value explain why these natural evolutions of

the meal kit occur. Participant justifications for initially using the meal kit service can be

attributed to their perception of opportunity in the service’s resources, which mitigated

their highly undesired meal planning responsibilities (Akaka et al., 2014; Ellway & Dean,

2015). But the participants’ continued usage of meal kit resources increased their

familiarity with the service’s capabilities. This familiarity is then used in conjunction with

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their understanding of contextual factors to consider alternative applications of the

service’s resources (Ellway & Dean, 2015). Consequently, this inspired participants to use

the meal kit in alternative ways to realise other contextually informed goals. The flexibility

of the meal kit’s value proposition is demonstrated in Sections 5.3 and 5.4, which describe

instances of participants utilising the meal kit’s resources as a parenting tool (participants

3, 4 and 5), a premise to eat and connect at the dinner table (participants 1 and 2), and as a

growth medium for a veggie patch (participant 6). This conceptual mechanism of the

participants’ context factors and experience naturally reshaping the application of a value

proposition was also identified by Frow et al. (2014), who concluded that a value

proposition will change in relation to the network into which it is inserted.

This natural malleability of the value proposition infers a promising co-creation mechanism

for both the meal kit service and service designers. This dynamic implies that it is not

necessary for the meal kit service to generate a vast series of meal kit variants that

accommodate the specific food values of each meal kit user. Instead, if this dynamic was

strategically embraced by the meal kit service, they could potentially provide a single

product with the intention that its users will reappropriate service resources for their

personal values. However, the successful modification of the meal kit’s value proposition is

dependent on its ability to align with the existing VISC processes of the customer and their

network (Storbacka et al., 2015). This was captured through participants 3 and 4’s

difficulties with the meal kit, where their inability to change service elements challenged

their VISC processes and ultimately led to the cancellation of the service. The repeated

challenge to their VISC processes can be considered as an imbalance within the individual’s

network, which motivated subsequent removal of the challenging actor (i.e. meal kit) so

that their network could continue to perform their more preferred VISC processes (Frow et

al., 2014).

So when considering how service designers can strategically design service features that

encourage the natural co-creation of the service, the linking resolution presented in Section

5.5 suggests a solution. Section 5.4 demonstrates how participants engaged in bonding and

bridging practices to resolve or mitigate the shortcomings experienced when performing

linking practices with the meal kit. Extending upon Lusch and Nambisan’s (2015) service

innovation model, it can be inferred that while the resource density of the meal kit’s value

proposition is important for value co-creation, the user’s ability to apply additional network

resources onto the value proposition’s resource density is also essential. This is

characterised by participant 5, who greatly appreciates the meal kit’s adoption of the highly

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undesired meal planning activities, despite its failure to consider her household’s dietary

needs. However, participant 5 is able to reappropriate the meal kit’s portion size by

personally sourcing additional ingredients from another grocer, and align the service’s

meals with her household’s weight requirements for their competitive sport. This natural

resolution is representative of users sourcing assistance from additional actors to

overcome a restriction of their linking practices performed with the service.

This founds the design consideration that the meal kit service could reduce the limitations

its linking practices afflict on its users by broadening their access to additional resources of

other network members. As each household consists of a different network composition,

bonding practices, while being the most easily accessed basis of resources, are too

inconsistent to be relied upon (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015). Instead, the

meal kit service could artificially enhance customer bridging practices through the

development of a shared platform such as a website, and increase the visibility of peers

with similar experiences. Through the use of this platform, participants experiencing similar

problems could be exposed to the solutions of other members, thus inspiring new

capabilities and tweaking the purpose and associated symbols attributed to the meal kit

(Akaka et al., 2014; Frow et al., 2014; Koskela-Huotari, Edvardsson, Jonas, Sörhammar, &

Witell, 2016). Koskela-Huotari, Edvardsson, Jonas, Sörhammar, & Witell (2016) reinforce

this notion, as they state that the inclusion of new network actors inspires new ways of

‘how things are done’. The establishment of a meal kit community through an online

platform can also benefit the firm, as it acts as centralised location to observe community-

generated symbols (Akaka et al., 2014).

A design team could observe and then gauge the popularity of specific symbols through the

previously discussed CSEP practice chains, and then inform future service iterations that

are tailored to the specific scenario of use. This potential establishment of a contribution

culture through an online platform further aligns with new product design literature, which

suggests that this would essentially convert meal kit customers into members of the firm’s

R&D team (Filieri, 2013). This informs a dynamic that reinforces Wallin et al.’s (2016)

proposal that the firm should relinquish the creation of the meal kit to its customers, who

naturally do so through the reconfiguration of the value proposition within their context.

Furthermore, if the firm was to collect and implement these co-created community

symbols into future service iterations, this effectively increases customer loyalty while

simultaneously converting the online community a competitive asset (Filieri, 2013;

Sindhwani & Ahuja, 2014). Co-created solutions have already been acknowledged to be

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difficult to replicate by competition (Sindhwani & Ahuja, 2014). Even if a competing meal

kit firm implemented a similar service variation to one generated by the focal meal kit’s

community, the target audience would already be accounted for, as they were involved in

the development of the originally tailored service.

In conclusion, this study’s exploration of each participant’s appropriation of the service and

subsequent discovery of the linking resolution clarifies that the meal kit service would

benefit from enhancing its customers’ bridging practices. This dynamic first contributes to

SDL’s emergent interests of how value co-creation occurs on a meso-micro scale (Vargo et

al., 2016), by inferring how the individual coordinates the resources of immediate network

actors to ensure the appropriateness the service during VISC. With the establishment of

this dynamic, this study suggests that it can be embraced by a service by enhancing the

users network, which takes the form of a centralised online platform. This centralised

online platform suggests a promising and beneficial mechanism that contributes to the

growing interest (Lusch & Nambisan, 2015; Storbacka et al., 2016) in how to actively

facilitate SDL’s network influenced value co-creation (Vargo & Lusch, 2016).

6.4 Designing for value co-creation with the network

This section diverts from Section 6.2 and 6.3’s discussion of value co-creation mechanisms

and its potential for the meal kit service, and examines how the combined application of

SDL and participatory design concepts was mutually beneficial for this study. Furthermore,

this section will consider how the continued application of both paradigms can influence

the design of services for both meal kit services and alternative contexts.

This study’s exploration of SDL’s most recent variation of value co-creation (Vargo & Lusch,

2016, 2017; Vargo et al., 2016) suggests that service design processes will subsequently

change; much like how SDL originally transformed service design from developing

touchpoints for the service to facilitating co-creative engagements with customers

(Kimbell, 2011). With regard to Kimbell & Blomberg’s (2017) contemporary definition of

service design, this study specifically contributes to two of the three dimensions they use to

characterise the objective purpose of service design. Beginning with service design’s

engagement with socio-material configurations (Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017), the CSEP

practice chains used in this study provide a means of establishing the user’s role, who they

interact with and the purpose of their actions during the co-creation of value. Service

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design’s second purpose of creating value co-creation systems (Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017)

is also enhanced by this study’s identification of the linking resolution. The proposed linking

resolution presents a mechanism that utilises CSEP’s normalizing practices to clarify how

the individual draws upon their immediate network to reappropriate commercial resources

offered by a service.

This study’s application of CSEP practices formed an effective means of conceptualising

how to design for the value co-creation process. The findings capture how, despite each

participant’s differing network composition and contextual routines, the abstraction of

participant processes into 16 symbolic value co-creation practices made the comparison of

participant actions feasible. As demonstrated in Section 5.2, this method of abstracting

specific processes into practices characterised what purpose was expected of the service

during participant VISC processes. In line with growing suggestions from service scientists

(Chandler & Chen, 2016; Frow, McColl-Kennedy, & Payne, 2016; Storbacka et al., 2016;

Vargo & Lusch, 2017), this approach to synthesising participant processes proved beneficial

when conceptualising how to design for value co-creation with both the user and their

network. Furthermore, this study’s implementation of the CSEP model outside of the

medical context it was originally conceived within reinforces the notion that its 16 practices

proved effective (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015). This study further clarifies the

functional characteristics of these practices the cyclical stages of VIU (Ellway & Dean, 2015)

assisted in further clarifying the relationship and progression of participant practices.

Therefore, this analytical tool is also considered to be a useful for both service design and

service science by enhancing the development of co-creative services by providing a means

of observing contemporary applications of the service (Patrício et al., 2018). Furthermore,

the malleability of the CSEP practices suggests that the practice chains could be reapplied

to future iterations of the service, resulting in a repeatable process from which captures

the constantly evolving, user-led applications of the meal kit.

While the abstraction of practices assisted the analysis of the meal kit’s application, the

information it presents also affects service designers and how they frame the purpose of

the service they are tasked with creating. Instead of developing a highly detailed service

that dictates functions to the participant, the broader characteristics of the value creation

practices forces the consideration of service functions that are more reliant on user efforts

when implementing service resources. Consequently, this dynamic inspired service

iterations that were more passive in nature, and better reflects SDL’s founding perspective

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that the commercial firm exists to support the endeavours of the customer (Vargo & Lusch,

2004).

Digressing from the use of practices, this study also considers the application of

participatory design perspectives as highly appropriate when exploring and facilitating

SDL’s value co-creation. While this study did not engage in a full participatory design

process, the exploration of the meal kit from the fuzzy front end (Sanders, 2013) enabled

the capture of participant attitudes and expectations attributed to the meal kit service, and

how it functioned in relation to other integral network (i.e. household) members. The

collection of this broader dataset consequently informed rich VISC descriptions that may

not have emerged from a study scoped around a predetermined problem or application

(Wright & McCarthy, 2015). This method consequently provided a means of collecting vital

VISC insights that can be used to establish how the individual will accommodate, change,

remove and warp the resources provided with their network, therefore answering Patrício,

Gustafsson and Fisk’s (2018) call for these mechanisms. In summary, this study shares an

emerging perception that participatory design concepts are beneficial in informing the

application of co-creative service design (Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017b; Patrício et al., 2018;

Yu & Sangiorgi, 2018). In exploring the fuzzy front end, this study has also laid the

foundation through which subsequent participatory design stages could be launched from,

with the proposed community platform presenting an opportunity to engage participants

en masse in the co-design of the meal kit.

And so, the synthesis of participant responses through the CSEP practice chains can be

utilised by service designers or scientists with other SDL concepts to inform how a firm’s

value proposition could be appropriated for a network. This method of analysing and

distilling qualitative customer data into VISC processes is as follows:

1. Beginning in the fuzzy front end, collect customer descriptions of their current

routines, in conjunction with their attitudes towards the service and other network

members during the process.

2. Abstract these VISC processes through CSEP as follows:

a. Identify the individual’s current representational practices performed

during a task by asking who organises an activity and why, then compare

their response with their desired position; e.g. participant wants to take

control (i.e. assimilating practices) but cannot.

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b. To clarify which normalizing practices are enacted, ask how the individual

utilises the service’s value proposition in relation to other network

members; e.g. meal kit challenges an aspect, however a family member

resolves it. Participant descriptions of other actors will also help infer the

desired representational practices they wish to perform; e.g. ‘Partner does

X, but I wish they did Y.’

c. Distil participant actions through exchange practices to understand the

purpose of each task being performed by the individual, and consider if

they overlap, are challenged, or should be adopted by the service; e.g.

looking up meals.

3. Build a practice chain from the event discussed. Start the chain within a specific

event described by the participant, and segment this event into the capacity in

which the individual is involved (representational practices), followed by who was

involved (normalizing practices), and then what actions were performed by the

individual (exchange).

4. Compare the practice chain performed with participant descriptions of what they

desire to happen. Does the participant’s desired value creation process align with

how the firm’s value proposition is implemented by the participant? Does the

service’s function align with the symbols (Akaka et al., 2014) participants attribute

to it? Does the participant engage in other normalizing practices when they

encounter a problem with the service? Is a satisfactory resolution achieved?

5. Use these comparisons to consider which components of the meal kit must be

addressed. Commonly identified conflicts could be used as the foundation from

which the firm and its customers negotiate how a service’s symbol could be better

realised, or even how new symbols could be implemented through future value

proposition iterations.

6. Restart this process post-implementation of the new value proposition.

In conclusion, this method presents a reproducible process that collects qualitatively rich

participant narratives of their VISC processes, which can then distil into what purpose the

service must fulfil during the customer’s creation of value. This abstraction from process

into purpose benefits service designers by providing a means to holistically consider what

purpose the firm’s value proposition must fulfil within the user’s network. In designing for

this specific role, the service strategically considers what resources are necessary, while

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ensuring that the customer can continue to perform their intrinsically determined VISC

process (Frow et al., 2014).

6.5 Conclusion This chapter demonstrates how the merger of SDL and participatory design concepts has

informed a process that is adept at extracting unique VISC processes from a varied series of

users. Their contributions can then be synthesised into a comparable dataset that can

assist service designers understand participant attitudes and expectations attributed to a

service entity in their VISC processes. Section 6.2 describes how the CSEP practice chains

can be used to identify the predominant functions expected of the service. The method

utilised in this study can then be used to understand what core role is expected of the

service by its customers, and gauge how future value propositions can fulfil specific

network roles that contribute to the creation of customer VISC. This notion of the service

fulfilling its expected network role is then used to suggest how the value proposition could

be modified to increase customer involvement in a positive manner that empowers them

to resolve the shortcomings of the service.

Section 6.3 utilises the observations of participant modifications to answer the primary

research goal of this study by concludes that the meal kit service indirectly assist in the

creation of social food values. Ellway & Dean (2015) and Frow et al.’s (2014) notion of

learning through continued resource application is used to reason why participants

envisioned new applications of the meal kit’s value proposition after implementing it in

their specific contexts. This method of reappropriation suggests that the firm could actively

accommodate these social food values by utilising both value co-creation symbols and the

linking resolution mechanism. The linking resolution suggests that the resiliency of service

functions could be improved by encouraging enhancements of the product by the

customer’s immediate network. These proposals for user-led modification are used to

justify why the meal kit service would benefit from the development of an online

community platform affiliated with the service. By employing understandings of purpose

and function identified from the CSEP practice chains, the firm’s value proposition can

implement these community-generated symbols to inform future service iterations. This

section concludes with how this online community essentially functions as both a means to

improve customer loyalty while simultaneously converting the customer base into the

firm’s R&D team (Filieri, 2013).

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Section 6.4 examines this study’s merger of SDL, participatory design and service design

concepts, and considers their mutual applicability when developing complex services. This

study first considers how SDL’s concept of service ecosystems influenced this study’s

approach, upon which the conclusion is made that service design processes can benefit

from utilising practices rather than detailed processes (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier,

2015; Storbacka et al., 2015; Chandler & Chen, 2016). This section then considers the

application of participatory design perspectives and methods in this project, and how they

can benefit other value co-creation studies. This section then discusses how the of the

fuzzy front end (Sanders, 2013) greatly benefited the exploration of existing VISC processes,

and proved critical for establishing the relationship between the meal kit service and the

participants. This section concludes with how the methods used in this study could be

implemented in other contexts where the service must engage with participants who are

already engaged in personal and valued processes.

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7. Implications and conclusion 7.1 Theoretical implications Beginning with McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) CSEP framework, this study’s

exploration and subsequent identification of all CSEP practices in the findings further

reinforces functional descriptions of each CSEP practice. However, this study’s merger of

the framework with Ellway & Dean’s (2015) cyclical stages of value-in-use further clarify the

functioning relationship between the practice archetypes. This combined application can

be used to associate the characteristics of Ellway & Dean’s (2015) five stages with its

partnered CSEP archetype, further bolstering the understanding of what occurs during the

individual’s VISC process. While applied on a small scale, this approach to converting highly

detailed processes into representative value creation efforts could prove useful when

analysing VISC processes at broader scales. This potential measure contributes to multiple

calls from service scientists attempting to better understand how value is co-created in a

network (Barile et al., 2016; Vargo et al., 2016). The linking resolution contributes to SDL

understandings of network influence over the co-creation of value (Frow, McColl-Kennedy,

& Payne, 2016; Vargo et al., 2016), and supports Storbacka et al.’s (2015) notion that a

service is an extension of the individual’s endeavours. Furthermore, its adoption of

contemporary definitions of co-creation proposes a method that expands beyond the

dyadic customer–firm relationship to acknowledge the influence of the user’s network.

Therefore, the linking resolution provides a means of conceptualising how the participant

uses their network to change the services value proposition, thus corresponding to the

interest in mapping value co-creation with a service at a micro-meso scale (Barile et al.,

2016; Frow, McColl-Kennedy, & Payne, 2016).

The exploration of participant routine processes through the fuzzy front end (Sanders,

2013) and their synthesisation through the CSEP framework (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, &

Ferrier, 2015) made the comparison of meal kit applications much more manageable.

Therefore, the practice chains used in this study could benefit other service designers and

service scientists in discerning the purposes of user processes and where their services fit in

relation to them. This beneficial outcome further reinforces suggestions to use practices as

a method of designing for value co-creation rather than attempting to discern each unique

process (Storbacka et al., 2015; Chandler & Chen, 2016), and is especially relevant as

interests in service eco-systems increase (Barile et al., 2016; Vargo et al., 2016; Vargo &

Lusch, 2017).

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This study also corresponds to strong interests within the service science discipline by

proposing how service design can be used to implement contemporary notions of value co-

creation, and how that reshapes the creation of services (Ostrom et al., 2015; Barile et al.,

2016; Vargo et al., 2016; Vargo & Lusch, 2017). While this study did not engage in the full

participatory design process, this study’s exploration of the fuzzy front end with

participatory design tools has informed a foundation through which an unabridged

participatory design process could be implemented in the future. Furthermore, this study’s

adoption of participatory design perspectives to inform the methodology contributes to

service science by demonstrating that design is more than just a creative process used to

implement service concepts, and that its philosophical perspectives can greatly influence

the scope and subsequent application of these concepts. And so this study’s initial

application of participatory design contributes to a growing trend as researchers continue

to establish this richer application of service design by the service sciences (Wetter-Edman,

2009; Wetter-Edman et al., 2014; Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017; Kurtmollaiev et al., 2018). This

study therefore answers calls by Ostrom et al. (2015) to further clarify the relationship

between service dominant logic and service design by proposing a method that reduces the

complexity associated with designing co-creative services. This study also contributes to the

growing perspective that the mutual application of participatory design and SDL concepts

are beneficial for future service design scenarios (Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017b; Wetter-

Edman et al., 2014), and may prove key to the development of naturally evolving services

(Barile et al., 2016).

7.2 Managerial implications This study’s exploration of value co-creation through service dominant logic and service

design presents optimistic outcomes for both the meal kit service and design practitioners.

Beginning with the analysis of participant processes, this study identified that the service

was used as a parenting tool, and justification to eat dinner at the table with a loved one.

This demonstrates participants expanding the service’s application beyond its predominant

focus of convenience, health and lowered cooking ability. From this observation, this study

concludes with the notion that customers are the masters of their own solutions and are

wholly capable of realising their unique values attributed to dinner, provided they can

access and implement the resources necessary. It is here that value co-creation concepts

can expand upon this naturally occurring dynamic.

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This study demonstrates how the CSEP framework (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier,

2015) can be appropriated by service designers to distinguish what network role is

attributed to the service. The resulting practice chains can therefore be used by service

designers and service researchers to simplify complex and varied descriptions of user value

creation processes. The understanding of these processes can be used to establish whether

users want the service to adopt a leading (i.e. assimilating) or supporting (i.e. producing)

role, how the firm’s resources are used in conjunction with other network members (i.e.

normalizing practices), and what service features should be offered to the user to align

with their desired processes (i.e. exchange practices). Clarifying these three dimensions

prior to the development of specific service functions ensures that the service does not

dictate or undermine the user’s expected VISC processes (Ellway & Dean, 2015), thereby

mitigating the occurrence of failed or deviant co-creation (Greer, 2015; Heidenreich et al.,

2015).

If the firm can facilitate both the each customer’s natural appropriation of the meal kit

(Frow et al., 2014), and analyse the naturally generated co-created symbols (Akaka et al.,

2014) through CSEP (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015), this presents a means of

identifying commonly attributed roles to the service. If a mutually perceived, popular role

was to be identified, the meal kit service could then plan future iterations that specifically

accommodate this role. An immediate example of this would be the parenting tool

identified among participants 3, 4 and 5. Through the simple enactment of collecting

household member names, the service could then assign specific meals through the recipe

cards sent to each family. In doing so, the meal kit reinforces the personalizing and

classification practices conducted by each parent as they assign cooking responsibilities to

their children. This example clarifies how the continued analysis and strategic adoption of

network roles naturally created by users for the meal kit (Frow et al., 2014), can provide a

continuous source of service innovation (Filieri, 2013) that reflects the community engaged

with the service.

This reciprocal notion can be further enhanced through this study’s identification of the

linking resolution. The observation that users will resolve insufficient linking practices

through successive bonding and bridging practices leads to the conclusion that a service

can enhance its appropriateness by expanding the user’s network. This study first

establishes that the individual’s immediate network composition is too circumstantial to

rely upon (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015). However, opportunities can be found

in artificially expanding their bridging practices through a centralised online platform. Much

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like Lusch & Nambisan’s (2015) suggestion that a product can be enhanced through the

provision of auxiliary online operant resources, the provision of a community-centred

online platform provides a centralised location through which customers can access

additional operant resources. Furthermore, if users were to share their solutions through

this medium, this could inform new co-created symbols associated with the service’s value

proposition (Akaka et al., 2014).

The benefit of promoting these new value co-creation symbols presents a means of

inspiring alternative applications of the meal kit for less experienced users’ despite the

value proposition’s resources remaining the same (Frow et al., 2014; Lusch & Nambisan,

2015). Furthermore, the popularity of a community generated symbol could also be

measured by marketers/designers through the online platform and subsequently

developed if appropriate; i.e. selling optional spice and herb seeds for common meals,

which are then grown by the customer with the excess packaging as the growth medium.

With the establishment of the CSEP practice chains as a means of understanding user value

co-creation processes, this method could potentially be adopted within other commercial

and non-commercial entities. This understanding therefore contributes to a growing

interest in SDL, which attempts to define how to better engage customers in the co-

creation of products they wish to use, much like Costa et al.’s (2017) exploration with

manufacturing firms. However, the themes of natural evolution and customer-driven

modification observed in this study may be much more apparent due to the accessibility of

food. Manufacturing products may face more severe challenges when facilitating co-

creative communities due to the specialist knowledge required for the manufacture of

products (Costa et al., 2017). However, communities such as IKEAHackers

(https://www.ikeahackers.net, accessed 1/05/2018) demonstrate that community-led

reappropriation’s of physical products are still feasible.

Outside of designing the meal kit’s value proposition, this study’s adoption of food literacy

and food security concepts suggests that the CSEP practice chains may also benefit

dieticians and government agencies when planning cooking interventions. Perry et al.

(2017) concludes that social and contextual factors must be addressed to successfully

resolve food literacy. However, Begley, Gallegos and Vidgen (2017) express that the dietary

discipline’s predominant use of surveys to collect this contextual data is insufficient when

determining the success of these food interventions. The data collection and subsequent

analytical process utilised in this study suggest an opportunity to identify participant

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motivations, values and limitations that are influential when encouraging long-term dietary

changes. Therefore, the CSEP analysis could be applied through service design concepts to

assist dieticians in planning a multifaceted cooking intervention that holistically addresses

food literacy (Begley, Gallegos, & Vidgen, 2017). This scenario demonstrates how the

practice chains used in this study may best be used as a means of designing (or potentially

co-creating) services that enhance the existing VISC processes of users (Edvardsson,

Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2011; Ellway & Dean, 2015). It does so by informing what resources are

appropriate and desired by the user, while ensuring that their provision doesn’t challenge

the existing processes, thereby improving the co-creation of value.

7.3 Conclusions This study explores how the meal kit service could accommodate the complex and highly

unique values that its customers attribute to dinner, while continuing to sell a product at

commercial scales. To achieve this three goals were established for this study, which

consisted of: determining how to organise the unique customer processes and values when

using the meal kit into a comparative dataset; applying contemporary service dominant

logic concepts to this dataset to establish how the unique values of each meal kit customer

could be facilitated through value co-creation (Vargo et al., 2016); and suggest how service

design could implement these service science concepts into meal kit service’s functions,

ultimately improving their capacity to accommodate the unique food values of its

customers.

The exploration of six household dinner routines through the fuzzy front end (Sanders,

2013) established how the meal kit service was routinely utilised to co-create value (i.e.

dinner). This informed a number of key processes that participants attributed to the

enactment of dinner, which were subsequently used as a basis to formulate specific value

creation processes (Edvardsson, Tronvoll & Gruber, 2011; Ellway & Dean, 2015). This

analysis reinforced the literature review’s primary argument that the meal kit’s

supplementation of cooking skills and groceries, while beneficial, was at times insufficient

after considering the other dimensions of each participant’s dinner. With the collection of

participant cooking descriptions, the subsequent analysis of these VISC processes through

McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) CSEP practices presents a means of distilling

the unique responses into a comparable data set.

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This study clarifies how the application of SDL concepts through participatory design

perspectives can inspire new methods of designing complex services such as the meal kit

service. In adopting SDL’s concept of value co-creation (Vargo & Lusch, 2016) and

considering solutions that reflect existing processes (Sanders, 2013), this study presents

outcomes that can be used by the meal kit service to support its users’ established value

creation processes with their immediate network. This is achieved by first proposing a

means of using the CSEP framework to identify existing co-creation roles within a network.

With the collection of participant cooking descriptions, the subsequent analysis of these

VISC processes through McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015) CSEP practices

presents a means of distilling the unique responses into a comparable data set. This study

further enhances this analytical process by adopting Ellway and Dean's (2015) value

creation stages to clarify the sequential relationship between the representational,

normalizing and exchange practice archetypes (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015).

Consequently, service designers and researchers can use these practice chains to abstract

detailed user processes with the meal kit service into a sequence that clarifies the user’s

desired role (representational practices), who is involved (normalizing practices), and their

underlying purpose(s) of the value creation activities enacted (exchange practices).

Consequently, these practice chains present a means for service designers and researchers

to consider the unique customer VISC processes by abstracting vast responses into a more

manageable data set that may prove useful for analysis at larger scales.

This study also contributes to service design by supporting Kimbell and Blomberg's (2017)

proposal that practices can be used by designers to develop services that impart fewer

restrictions on the user’s processes. This is achieved through the abstraction of detailed

processes through the CSEP practice chains. This assists the design of complex services by

informing a method that gauges how closely a service’s function aligns with the value

creation processes of the participants. The understanding of which forms the basis for

distinguishing how closely the meal kit’s existing functions align with, or challenges, the

VISC processes of its users (Edvardsson, Tronvoll, & Gruber, 2011). This method of analysis

also corresponds to Storbacka et al.’s (2015) conclusion that a service’s value proposition

should be designed with the intention of integration by both the customer and their

immediate network. Consequently, a service designer can use this comparison to consider

how a service’s functions either adopts, or aligns with, the processes of its users. This is

highly beneficial, as if the service’s function more closely resembles the network role

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designated to it by the customer, it is more likely to mitigate defective or deviant value co-

creation (Greer, 2015; Heidenreich et al., 2015).

Expanding from the practice chains developed in this study, the subsequent comparison of

each participant’s specific dinner stages enabled the identification of both commonly

attributed roles to the meal kit service (e.g. the household meal planner), or contextually

informed applications (e.g. the parental tool used to assign cooking responsibilities to

children). The comparison of each participant’s normalizing practices during their

appropriation of meal kit resources demonstrated how they would draw on more

immediate network members to resolve the shortcomings of the meal kit service. The

analysis of these changes to the meal kit’s value proposition through CSEP’s normalizing

practices (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, & Ferrier, 2015) expanded upon Frow et al.’s (2014)

observation by inferring that the service’s resources (linking practices) were being

supplemented by the resources of more immediate network actors (bonding or bridging

practices) to achieve a resolution. In changing the meal kit’s value proposition, participants

also modified its capabilities and subsequent functions to better align with their desired

VISC processes. These interactions informed another key outcome of this study, which was

the linking resolution dynamic.

This study’s proposal of the linking resolution contributes to service science calls for

understanding how value propositions are changed by the network they are inserted into

(Storbacka et al., 2015). It does so by using McColl-Kennedy, Cheung and Ferrier’s (2015)

functional descriptions of normalizing practices to explain why participants would enlist

immediate network actors to change the function of the firm’s value proposition to better

fit their context. The linking resolution further defines Frow et al.’s (2014) conclusion that a

firm’s value proposition is malleable due to its varied application by different users and

their network members. The observation of this dynamic is promising for the meal kit, as it

clarifies that participants were at times able to align the meal kit to their needs rather than

submitting the meal kits specific processes. However, the participant’s success in achieving

this was found to be influenced by their ability to both source the necessary resources of

immediate network actors and apply them to the meal kit’s resource density and modify its

original function (Lusch & Nambisan, 2015).

Upon the discovery of the linking resolution, this study proposes how it can be embraced

by service designers. In line with SDL’s interest in service ecosystems (Frow et al., 2014;

Vargo et al., 2016), the linking resolution inspired the design consideration that a service’s

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resilience among varying user contexts could be enhanced by increasing the potential

network actors the user can draw on during the value co-creation process. This study

further uses the characteristics of CSEP’s normalizing practices (McColl-Kennedy, Cheung, &

Ferrier, 2015) to conclude that each users’ immediate network composition is too

inconsistent for bonding practices to be relied upon, therefore informing the proposal of

enhancing the user’s ability to conduct bridging practices. To achieve this, this study

proposes that a service designer could further broaden the user’s network through the

provision of an online platform.

Consequently, this platform would present a method of inspiring alternative applications of

the meal kit without the direct assistance from the service (Akaka et al., 2014). This

proposal is supported by service science literature, which establishes that the individual’s

evaluation of potential actors informs their value co-creation strategy (Ellway & Dean,

2015), which subsequently informs alternative applications of the default value proposition

(Akaka et al., 2014). Furthermore, this centralised location provides a single point from

which a design team could observe how the meal kit is used en masse. In doing so, the

stages of this study could be repeated to consequently inform the design of other meal kit

iterations that accommodate other commonly attributed VISC roles. This method of

collecting customer informed modifications of the meal kit’s value proposition through a

central online platform may even provide an essential component that contributes to Barile

et al.’s (2016) proposed ‘evolutionary’ services.

This study concludes by clarifying how the application of service science concepts through

participatory design perspectives and methods enhanced the exploration of value co-

creation, and can assist in future designs of complex services. In line with the evolution of

service design, the application of emergent service science concepts will subsequently

inform the design and implementation of innovative services (Kimbell, 2011; Wetter-

Edman et al., 2014). And so, this study’s exploration of SDL’s recent interest

accommodating networks (Vargo et al., 2016) informed new analytical methods that

service designers can utilise to clarify what purpose the firm’s resources serve within the

user’s network. Therefore, this study’s observation and synthesis of unique customer

dinner processes informs value co-creation mechanisms that benefit not only the meal kit

industry, but service science and service design paradigms as well. The outcome of which

presents a means of designing innovative services that balance the multitude of potential

user values, while continuing the provision of a service at commercial scales.

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7.4 Limitations The first limitation of this study emerges around the methodology underpinning this

research study and subsequent research design. The social constructivist epistemology

(Kukla, 2000) and the highly qualitative nature of this study means that both participant

contributions and the researcher’s analysis affect the contributions of this study. Primarily,

this thesis acknowledges that the findings of this study are not objective truth, but rather

representations of how value is created. The generative and open nature of both the

cultural probe and cognitive mapping exercise mean that participants are disclosing a

subjective version of their dinner. Therefore, it is entirely possible that participants may

have omitted or altered descriptions of their dinner process out of potential

embarrassment or privacy. Furthermore, in using participant descriptions rather than

physical observations of their cooking process, parts of their process may not have been

mentioned, either purposefully or out of absent-mindedness. However, this study’s core

aim to explore customer values, perceptions of their processes and future desires was

considered more important for this study than a dedicated user testing study. This is

because a week-long series of field observations within multiple participant households

was considered excessive. Furthermore, while these observations of service usage could

capture specific functions, this study’s interest in values meant that it was essential to

collect participants’ desires, frustrations and concerns attributed to their processes. And as

this study aimed to then abstract participant descriptions of process into a series of

representational purposes (i.e. practices), this meant that any in-depth observations of

physical processes would have been obscured in the process.

When considering the bias of the primary researcher during the analysis of participant

descriptions, the section 3.2.1 first uses the social constructivist epistemology to

acknowledge that researcher bias cannot be entirely eliminated in the first place (Kukla,

2000). But with this point established, steps were taken to reduce bias in the analysis. As

such, a longitudinal process was applied to the conversion of participant VISC to practice

chains, where the analysis was repeated at different times and in different formats (drafts

in a design journal, online practice chains, physical annotations over printed practice

chains, final version for the discussion). This ensured that each finding was repeatedly

tested under different circumstances to ensure a cohesive conclusion of CSEP properties

and function attributed to the participant response. Attempts to reduce bias in both the

creation and application of the cognitive mapping activity were also made. Participants

were encouraged to self-enlist themselves, where the predominant determinant for

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participant applicability was either using the service, or had recently used the service but

quit. The open-ended format of the cognitive mapping exercise also encouraged the

participant to lead the conversation and themes discussed, as the researcher primarily

countered with questions specific to what was mentioned to further prompt discussion.

The second limitation of this study was that the small participant size is not representative

of all meal kit users. As such, the specific values and subsequent roles discussed are not

intended to be used as specific commercial targets for the meal kit service to aspire to

achieve. Consequently, this analysis of VISC processes is not representative of a broad set

of scenarios of use that would occur on a commercial scale. But despite this, the methods

chosen for this study are appropriate, as they were tailored to address the core problem of

how to accommodate uniquely determined values with a single product. As such, it was

important to understand how these values function in relation to the product, rather than

attempting to identifying every potential value attributed to the service. It is for this reason

that this study’s explorative nature is considered appropriate, as it was more important to

understand the mechanisms that underpin the formation of these food values and

subsequent network roles. As such, future quantitative endeavours could utilise the

methods in this study to identify with confidence the values and roles attributed to the

meal kit service.

In conclusion, the combination of both the subjective nature of both the data collection

and analysis, and small sample size demonstrate that this study is largely generative in

nature, and implores further testing of the models and outcomes proposed on a

quantitative scale.

7.5 Future works When considering future expansions from this study’s findings, four streams emerge. The

first stream extends on the commercial meal kit context and proposes why further

application of participatory design processes could inform commercial entities how to

accommodate network-informed value co-creation. The second stream expands upon one

of the limitations of this study and calls for a quantitative exploration of the themes

identified, and how the CSEP analysis could function at commercial scales. The third stream

considers how this study’s merger of participatory design and SDL paradigms could be

implemented in alternative contexts. The final stream expands upon specific dynamics

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identified when applying the CSEP framework, and proposes some amendments to its core

frameworks with subsequent testing.

Beginning with the first stream, this study’s implementation of the participatory designs

fuzzy front end means that this study is primed for the full implementation of SDL concepts

through a participatory design process and subsequent development of meal kit service

iterations. Furthermore, this study considers that the continued application of

participatory design and SDL concepts through a complete design development process

presents an opportunity to explore how the evolving nature value propositions (Frow et al.,

2014) and the symbols attributed to them could be better facilitated by the meal kit firm.

After collecting customer-generated symbols through the method utilised in this study,

subsequent stages of a participatory design methodology would then invite the same

participants to theorise how they would realise these symbols through service resources.

Consequently, this exploration of SDL concepts through the active involvement of

participants holds the potential to inform how continuous iteration and evolution of a

service’s value proposition could be managed by the customers using the service. The

findings from this exploration feeds into SDL’s recent interest of evolutionary services

(Ostrom et al., 2015; Barile et al., 2016; Beirão, Patrício, & Fisk, 2017).

The second stream for future research emerges from one of the previously discussed

limitations of this study, and calls for a quantitative exploration of how the themes

identified to test their viability at commercial scales. While this study demonstrated how

the CSEP framework was useful in synthesising multiple processes into a comparable

dataset, future studies could evaluate how this analytical process and observation of

practice chains functions at larger scales. To do so, the data collection methods would need

to establish a balance that maintains the collection of participant attitudes to their VISC

and expectations of the service, but not be overwhelmed by contributions on a commercial

scale.

The third stream emerges from section 6.2’s discussion of CSEP practice chains, and

considers how they could be applied and tested in other contexts. Further testing of this

analytical process may prove particularly useful in contexts where service outcomes are

contextually dependent and highly influenced by participant values. Cooking interventions

and their resolution of food literacy present an immediate example, where the CSEP

practice chains may prove useful in not only understanding both the contextual restraints

influencing participants experience, but more importantly collect the values and

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motivations that prove vital for developing programs that motivate continued healthy

cooking habits (Begley et al., 2017; Perry et al., 2017). Other alternative scenarios that this

concept could be implemented may also consist of self-managed healthcare and fitness

contexts.

The final stream of this research advises future application and testing of McColl-Kennedy

et al.'s (2015) CSEP framework. One potential experiment that was considered after the

application of CSEP was to utilise Grönroos’s (2011) distinctions of value facilitation and

value co-creation, instead of SDL’s ‘The individual is always co-creating value’ (Vargo &

Lusch, 2008). This consideration emerges after observing how participants were found to

implement personal resources to modify the function of their linking practices (i.e.

participant 6’s resolution of wastage by using it as growth medium for her veggie patch). It

is here that it becomes apparent how SDL’s and SL’s distinction of what is considered co-

creation influences the subsequent analysis. Despite participant 6 drawing on her personal

experiences to resolve a problem experienced with the service, SDL’s all-encompassing

notion that all applications of external resources are considered acts of value co-creation

(Vargo & Lusch, 2016) may over simplify this nuanced interaction. Alternatively, service

logic’s clarification between facilitation and co-creation (Grönroos & Voima, 2013) may

consider this act as a clear scenario of value facilitation, as participant 6’s endeavours are in

response to challenges made by the service to her desired value creation processes.

Therefore, further testing of CSEP framework with service logic’s differentiation between

value creation concepts may inform additional normalizing practices (i.e. DIY or drawing on

personal resources to appropriate the resources of other actors for VISC). This kind of study

would best be performed through the exploration of those who have cancelled their

service (i.e. participants 3 and 4), which could provide further examples of participants

attempting to overcome the meal kit’s difficulties.

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Appendices 8.1 Appendix A Examples of enlistment A1. Mind mapping enlistment via social media

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A2. cognitive map enlistment via social media

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8.2 Appendix B Initial trial of meal kit B1. Online reflective journal for meal kit trial (https://brettsfood.tumblr.com/, accessed

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1/05/2018)

8.3 Appendix C Cognitive Map Development C1. Design development of cognitive map task

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8.4 Appendix D Cognitive Map Pilot Studies D1. Early cognitive map with participant responses written on post-its

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D2. Tallying of cognitive map images and words

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D3. Cognitive map pilot studies

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D4. Final testing of cognitive map

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D5. Sample of cognitive map discussion guide/prompts

Service aspects (From user’s perspective) • How long have you been using the service for? • How often do you use it for dinner (3 or 5)?

o Why’s that? • How do you feel the service fits into the rest of your weekly processes?

o How could it improve? • When does the meal kit get delivered?

o Where does it get dropped off? o Is there a specific strategy for unpacking ingredients? o Are you finding that [service] is now fighting your fridge for other stuff you

keep in there usually? • Are you generally happy with the variety of meals provided?

o Are you cooking things you wouldn’t have before? o Do you ever feel [service] provides what you would order through takeout? o Would you ever attempt to make it yourself? o What are your thoughts their portion sizes? o Would you like to [plan your own portion sizes]?

• Have you cooked anything fairly intensive? o What made this intensive [prep, cook, time]? o Was this worth the effort?

• Have you ever had a time where [service function] hasn’t quite worked? o How did you work around it?

• Was that a successful meal? • What do you do with the menu’s?

o Are they important? Why? o Where do you keep them?

• Do you feel like you’d want to use [Service] in a learning capacity at all? o Why?

• Do you ever find yourself with a surplus of ingredients? • Are there any special circumstances that would cause you not use the service for a

specific night? o What happens instead?

Values, drive, goal

• What is keeping you committed to [Service]/Why did you cancel the service? • Are you get excited to return home to the meals? • Where do your cooking values lie?

o Is that a very important thing for you? • Do you ever have nights where you get home and you just don’t feel like cooking?

o Why? o What do you do instead?

• What would you consider is a meaningful experience? • Do you post any pictures of your meal to social media?

o Are they your meals or [service] meals? o Why do you do it?

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8.5 Appendix E Coding scheme and development

E1. Transcript with initial coding scheme

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E2. Participant 5’s transcript converted actions via post it notes

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E3. Early affinity diagram with post-it notes

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E4. Participant 5’s transcript converted into activity cards via Microsoft Word Table

P5/11 Unpacking: Fridge rules: HF has a dedicated shelf to prevent ingredients being “pushed to the back” + getting lost. :(

P5/11 Unpacking: Fridge Rules: HF has dedicated shelf in pantry. At eye level. “Expected cooking items” live underneath.

P5/12 Unpacking: Fridge rules: Family “lives a busy lifestyle” – Constrained by work+sport schedules. D: Rules make planning/cooking easier for P5 :)

P5/13 Prep: P5 uses recipe card to organize all ingredients onto bench before starting to cook. This is to prevent “rummaging mid meal” :|

P5/14 Prep: P5 has a tendency to start cooking but not be prepared resulting in mistakes. D: Recipes Cards are helping fix this.

P5/14 Prep: Altering P5 will alter Recipe’s suggested prepping process before starting to cook. This is to minimise utensils + save time/reduce washing :)

P5/15 Prep: Problem: HF have changed recipe card design which P5 does not like, even w/ added images :( Changes make it difficult for her process of prep before cooking. - Old cards were clearer on prep.

P5/16 Cooking: Altering: trust Ingredients P5 does not know are included in meal BC she “trusts” HF :D P5 only removes spicy ingredients because family ”is not big on spice”

P5/17 Cooking: Trust: P5 will cook/include ingredients she does not like BC she trusts HF. Partner + daughter do not trust HF: removed ingredients due to perceived spiciness. “meal was bland” D:

P5/18 Dinner: Preference: Family will “eat anything apart from spice” P5 appreciates that Chili is considered optional in HF meals.

P5/18 Cooking: Adventure -P5 does not like raw fish :( -HF provides a lot of fish recipes. -Cooking fish is foreign to her. -Dish turned out to be “really tasty” :D -Surprising positive experience.

P5/19 Cooking: Altering: P5 finds recipes + ingredients “simple” This makes it easy for her to add vege’s to meal. :D

P5/20 Prep: Planning: Altering: P5 Finds that HF recipes are light on vegetables :| Household is “a big vegetable family”. P5 Adds vege’s to HF recipe.

P5/21 Prep: Cooking: P5 does not like touching raw fish D:

P5/22 Planning P5 is “not a big cook”. -Dislikes planning/thinking what to cook. Much prefers being told what to do (by family/HF) :( - - > :D

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8.6 Appendix F Practice chain development F1. Early practice chain development

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F2. Mid practice chains development

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F3. Late practice chains development

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8.7 Appendix G Meal kit symbols

G1. Meal kit’s Landing page for their Commercial website

(https://www.hellofresh.com.au/landing/cook-this-for-dinner-2/, access 1/05/2018)