Design a product to choose cheese.

Clarification & Understanding

Right away this strikes me as really ambiguous so let's try to clarify what we're trying to accomplish here. Why are we doing this, what is our motivation for doing this? Do we have a specific objective with this design problem, like monetization? No, our only goal is to provide a really good experience to our users.

Does this product need to be physical? or can it be digital? That can be left up to us, but I am going to be leaning towards something digital as there are a lot more difficulties involved with scaling physical products.

Users

Even with the above questions answered this is still a pretty ambiguous problem, there are a bunch of different users who would choose a cheese for different reasons. Let's list out some of the different user segments and choose one to focus on:

1. Professional Chefs - Working in a kitchen at a restaurant and need to choose the correct cheese for their recipe(s)
2. Restaurant Owners - Know what type of cheese to order based upon the chef's recommendation, but now need to choose where to order the cheese from and what brand of that type of cheese to order
3. Regular People - These are your regular consumers who might buy cheese when grocery shopping for a recipe or to eat as is
4. Cheese Conniseurs - These are regular consumers who really love and appreciate cheese. They feel comfortable navigating their local neighborhood grocery store's cheese selection but might need a little guidance when shopping at a boutique imported goods store.
5. Store Managers - In charge of inventory for their store, could be either a large corporate grocery store chain or a boutique imported goods stores, need to figure out which cheese to stock
6. Cheese Producers - These are the manufacters / dairy farms who produce the cheese and need to figure out which type of cheese should they produce

Out of the above user segments, I'm going to suggest we focus on the Cheese Producers. For a lot of the consumer user segments choosing cheese isn't really that significant of a choice when it comes down to it. For the Cheese Producers choosing the right cheese to make and sell will have a large effect on the revenue of their business and is incredibly important. There is a much larger opportunity to provide a really good experience to the Dairy Farmers because choosing the right cheese is drastically more important to them.

Pain Points / Needs

1. How do I know which type of cheese is going to be popular amongst consumers
2. Regardless of consumer demand, how do I know if a market is going to be over saturated by competition?
3. If I haven't made a particular cheese recipe before, how do I know how its going to turn out?
4. How do I know which cheese will be able to be sold for the highest profit margin?

Solutions

1. Social Listener - As a proxxy for estimating consumer demand we could monitor and scrape social media to identify different upwards an downward cheese related trends on social media. Users would see an exploratory dashboard of how different cheese related hashtags and content are performing on different social media platforms. For example, a pasta dish consistong of diced cherry tomatoes and a block of feta cheese went viral at the start of the summmer.
2. Test Lab - We would create a microscale replica cheese production facility that instead of producing 1,000 lb batches of cheese produces just a lb or two. You could obivously make a small amount of cheese in your kitchen but those methods would be very different than what is used in a production facility so the outcome wouldn't be the same. Our micro facility would use all of the same processes used in large scale production to deliver production quality micro batches of cheese. Cheese producers could rent out our facility to experiment with and try out different recipes without having to commit to a large volume of product.
3. Blind Taste Testing as a Service - We would offer a service where cheese producers could contract us to go out into the wild and conduct Blind Taste tests on their behalf with the general public. Imagine the pepsi challenge, but for cheese. In addition to their individual results we could anonymize and aggregate the results to publish trends we're seeing. 

Prioritization

In all likelihood we won't have enough bandwidth to build all three solutions in parallel so we should pick one to focus on. In order to help us pick I'm going to use the following comparison matrix.

Ease of implementation, User Satisfaction

1. B, B-

2. C, A

3. A, A-

The Social Listener is a good idea on paper, but in reality I'm not sure that there is a large enough volume of cheese related content out there on social media to influence consumer buying habits on a large enough scale to make a difference. The tomato feta cheese pasta trend is the most prevalent one I've heard of so maybe we could use that a case study to test whether or not viral cheese trends actually have a significant effect on consumer demand.

The Test Lab is also a really useful idea that I could definitely see Cheese Producers using, but I see two issues with it. 1. Instead of paying to use our facility, why wouldn't they just create their own micro batch production facility in house? 2. Is it even feasible to build a micro batch production facility that successfully mimics the environment and conditions of large batch production? I have a close friend who isn't a cheese producer but a beer brewer, he mentioned that even scaling from one very large batch to a slightly larger batch can result in a wildly different product. I think more research needs to be done here to scope out whether or not this solution is technically feasible.

Blind Taste Testing as a Service (BTTaaS) - This is my favorite idea and the one I think we should go with. It will help cheese producers get direct feedback on how consumers like not only their products but their competitor's products as well. While this will require boots on the ground and won't scale as easily as a purely digital offering, this will be the least complex to set up and implement. 

At first glance, this looks like it runs into the same problem as the Test Lab idea where the Cheese Producers could simply conduct their own blind tase tests or contract out another non-cheese specific service to do this on their behalf. However, this product really becomes defensible when we anonymously aggregate the data we are getting from all users and publish different trends we are seeing across the industry. That is going to be our moat.

Summary

In order to provide a really great experience to Cheese Producers trying to decide which cheese to produce, we are going to offer Blind Taste Testing as a Service. This will allow the cheese producers to get direct feedback from consumers on their products as well as their competitors which will help them better understand consumer preferences and demand when choosing which cheese to produce.