The Issue

Salted egg production

My group was allocated to a small business owner, who produces salted eggs. His salted eggs are all hand processed, from the washing to the salting, each step is done manually by hand. By doing so, it takes him 2 hours to wash 100 eggs. During the 3 days that we stayed at his village, we got first hand experience of the preparation of salted eggs. He showed us how he washes the eggs, prepares the salt mixture and how the eggs are packaged for sale. Throughout these 3 days, we interacted with him and his family. We got to know them better and their motivation behind this business. While interacting with him, we noticed several potential issues that he may face during the processes. One of them was the long duration of squatting and bending to wash the eggs, furthermore, some of the environment he work in is quite cramped and stuffy. Another issue is that sometimes some of the eggs may crack during the marinating process due to the weight of the soil. To make matters worse, the profit margin of each egg is so small, that for every egg that cracks, he has to sell 4 eggs to cover the cost. Moreover, his marketing technique is not quite as effective as he hoped it would be.

After identifying all these potential problems, we had to pick one or two of them to focus our solution on. We went through our Design Thinking process to gather insights and help us to narrow down to the prevalent issue. We have also created a persona based on the business owner to help identify the need statement, so that when we design our product, it is designed around fulfilling the need statement.