Hi everyone,
Thank you again for your participation. I am sorry this thread ended up being so negative. I didn’t intend to frustrate or offend anyone with my post and survey. I definitely didn’t mean for my survey to be such a negative experience for you all. This is my first project were I have needed to get public input so I wasn’t quite prepared for that. But it was a great learning experience for me and I felt some good points were brought up.
I especially found the point interesting that people who choose to regularly eat at fast food places (ex. McDonald’s) probably do so because they don’t have cooking experience or background rather than it being that they don’t have the time. I will look into changing my focus for my product; maybe it would be more useful for busy parents or business people who enjoy cooking but are lacking on time. Definitely something I will be thinking about. I personally would love to tackle the task of finding an effective way of getting education about cooking to those who don’t have the experience and would benefit from a healthier life. But as a student I’m limited on time and solving the problem of the growing obesity rate in just a few months probably isn’t realistic :-)
When I asked for permission to post my survey it was recommended that I also share some of my results. Now this was before this all went downhill but I thought I would still share in case anyone was interested. A lot of these results may seem like common sense but I always feel that it is better to have proof than to just assume. Since I don’t hang out much in other people’s kitchens, I really only know how the cooking process is for my family and myself. There are things that I needed to check and some questions I have in trying to see if of my product ideas would actually be solving a need.
These results are from a pool of 30; both from eGullet and other places because I wanted a poll from both the highly experienced and from others with less experience in the kitchen.
First, it was found that 78% of the people who took the survey cook meals more often than bake desserts. I know this seems obvious but now I have proof that if I do something related to the cooking process vs. the baking process I could have an effect on a larger group.
Second for the question about gathering ingredients the majority, at 62%, said they gather all of their ingredients first. 21% chose the selection “grab ingredients as you go and put them away after use”.
This next one I found interesting. Of the 45% that chose the options of planning out their shopping list and writing things down as they run out, the majority where from the older demographic while of the 32% that chose the options that didn’t require pre planning, the majority where from the younger demographic.
When asking what you find to be the most time consuming when cooking, I was prepared for most the answers to be clean up but the majority answered that it was food prep. Clean up came in second, planning also came up a few times. The planning wasn’t something that I had considered much yet so I’ll definitely focus some on that as well.
I know that the question regarding what common staple ingredients you keep in your pantry seemed odd, but I wanted to make sure that if my products ends up needing to interact with these ingredients, my perception of the types of food in a pantry wouldn’t just limited to what I keep in my own.
I apologize for the long post and thank you to all of you. I know this didn’t seem to go well but I really do appreciate your help with my project, this was a great learning experience for me. I promise I am not a marketer and really did not intend to play games or to bait folks. I’m extremely sorry that I made you feel this way. I’m taking this all as a lesson so that I can improve in the future. I hope you all have a great day!
