12A - Figuring Out Buyer Behavior No. 1

My segment will be just lacto-ovo vegetarians, and for the purposes of this assignment I will exclude vegans, people with allergies, and people on other diets like keto and Atkins.

I interviewed three vegetarians who are also students at UF. I got the results I expected from these interviews, because they all have had on experience or another like my marshmallow incident (discovering that a food wasn't actually vegetarian long after implementing the diet). One of the interviewees even told me that the broccoli cheddar soup at Panera is made with chicken stock, and therefore isn't vegetarian (oops). So, my app idea would have benefited them (and myself, RIP Panera). massively in truthfully sticking to the vegetarian diet.




yikes
(I've been eating broccoli cheese soup the whole 2 years I've been vegetarian)

The times and places people have this problem the most is at restaurants. At grocery stores there is time to google a specific food product to find out if it's vegetarian or not, but at restaurants it's more convoluted. If a menu doesn't mark vegetarian options, the consumer has to scan all the items and see if anything doesn't list meat in the ingredients (if the menu even lists any). Then, if it is still unclear, the consumer has to ask the waitress to ask the chef if it is vegetarian, which turns into a big ordeal. Even then, if the waitress comes back and says it is, there's always the risk that the chef uses chicken broth to cook with instead of vegetable broth, so a food item might even still, surprisingly, have meat in it in some form. For example, stuffing that may not appear to have meat in it on the surface might not be vegetarian because it was cooked with chicken broth instead of vegetable broth, even though there's no tangible meat within the stuffing.

Like stated in the previous paragraph, when my segment of consumers discovers their unmet need (not knowing whether or not a product is vegetarian), they turn to google or ask the waiter to ask the chef. In both cases, the results might be unclear or outright incorrect. If they use google, they search "is _ vegetarian".

What I learned from these interviews is that my focus should shift away from grocery store food products to restaurants and fast food chains (hardly any fast food chains have vegetarian options besides salad, and even then you have to ask for it without any ham or bacon on top).



what a nice meat salad
*Shout-out to Wendy's for selling a baked potato. Wendy's is the only fast food I can ever eat *

Anyway, I am definitely going to have to shift my app's focus to be a companion for restaurant menus, or possibly consider even creating a vegetarian restaurant where all the food options are varied; the companion app for my restaurant would go into detail as to the preparation and ingredients involved for a more transparent consumer experience.

I would describe (with more specificity) this segment as lacto-ovo vegetarian consumers who eat out, based on the findings in my interviews.