Supporting Chicago’s food entrepreneurs

The Team: Yuan Feng, Matt Impola, Divya Iyengar, Kyungtae Kim, Grace Lee, David Pollack, Vidya Mantrala, Fanny Tan, Cristina Tarriba
Advisor: Tomoko Ichikawa
In Partnership with: Rodger Cooley, Chicago Food Policy Action Council (CFPAC)

Design Brief

In Fall 2018, the communication design workshop at IIT Institute of Design partnered with the Chicago Food Policy Action Council (CFPAC) to address the following challenge:

“How might we organize information around food business licensing in a visual way to help Chicago-area food entrepreneurs start, run and grow their business?”

We decided that our research would inform a collection of visual maps that would de-mystify the complicated and diverse licensing and certification procedures for starting a food business in Chicago. Additionally, we created a report of our findings that would be a starting point for other work of CFPAC as well as an artifact that would facilitate conversations between food entrepreneurs, consultants and government officials about innovation and equity within Chicago’s food business landscape.

The Process

*Design process graphic developed by Divya Iyengar and Yuan Feng*

Developing The Maps

Developing the maps was informed by 2 major sources:

Publicly available process handouts from the City of Chicago.
The lived experience of the business owners, legal and entrepreneurship consultants, and city officials

Through two "share-outs” we were able to bring city officials, aspiring and current entrepreneurs and consultants together to evaluate the maps as well as speak with each other about their experiences in obtaining licenses. This allowed us to iterate on our map prototypes, especially when we ran into surprises along the way.

Final presentation of maps, December 2018

Mobile prepared food vendor license map developed by Yuan Feng, Matt Impola, and Vidya Mantrala

Navigation Tool: A Web of Relationships

One of the major insights from our class’s research was the realization that starting a food business in Chicago requires navigating a network of stakeholders. We wanted to develop a tool to help contextualize all the people involved at the beginning regardless of whether your role is as a regulator, or business owner or consultant, and the various relationships and activities that need to be considered. The relationship web was developed in a small group including myself, Divya Iyengar, and Cristina Tarriba.

Presenting the relationship web to members from the Street Vendors Association (AVA)

At the final presentation in December of 2018, we presented this relationship tool to a combined group of entrepreneurs, employees from the City of Chicago Department of Public Health and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), as well as consultants from different advocacy, law and entrepreneurship organizations around the city. They agreed that this tool can help start conversations and the navigation process around business licensing.

Supporting this relationship web were key insights that we gathered from our primary research. These really helped the different groups in attendance at this event empathize better with the perspectives of other stakeholders and start productively engaging with each other on this important and complicated step to starting food business.

OUtcomes

This work was presented at the Chicago Food Policy Summit in February 2019. There are current efforts both at the Institute of Design to continue the work, as well as through CFPAC to develop even more accessible tools to make it through this crucial first step of the process. Feel free to check out our full report and navigation map catalog.

Here’s how CFPAC is talking about this work.