Picnic Works Product Development Examples

Led the Industrial Design effort for automated food service.

• Concept generation for new product development.

• Built low and high-fidelity prototypes for usability testing.

• Supported redesign of customer-facing components for UX improvements and cost-reduction initiatives.

• Created renders collateral and working prototypes for marketing needs.

Thank you to my team members at Picnic Works. Kyu Han (Director of Design), Isaac Jaeger (Product Designer), and Jack Lo (UX Designer).

PROJECT: Tabletop automated pizza station.

Discovery: Small mom-and-pop restaurants need more space for the current picnic equipment. The barrier is that they can't expand to make room and must remove a makeline table to make space, which is not an option.

Need: We need a new product that can adapt to smaller restaurants that fit within their existing floor space.

Product solution: With a tabletop form factor, small restaurants can swap their makeline tables with the new pizza station that fits within their floor place and still have the essential working surface for food prep needs.

PROJECT: Buffering System.

Discovery: On the existing Picnic station, we observed inefficiency in the workflow as kitchen workers had to stand and wait to place doughs at the ingress (front), and the second person stood by at the egress (exit) when the finished pizza was ready to be picked up. This observation is exacerbated more in commissary kitchens when they process high-volume orders or in mom-and-pop kitchens that get overwhelmed during rush hours.

Need: We need to improve the efficiency of the current station by eliminating wasted time and a second operator. 

Feature need: A buffer system that automates dough placement in the ingress and picks up to organize finished pizzas in the egress to make the station more efficient.

Blade Cover

• Form development

• UX improvement

• Cost savings

Need:  Some customer-facing components don’t fit the look and feel of the picnic standard. Also, the manufacturing process to create the parts are not scalable.