Redesign a supermarket: a practical case to rethinking urban food systems
Redesigning a Supermarket
You don't need to work in retail to get value from this session — supermarkets are simply our shared entry point into a much bigger conversation. Everyone shops, everyone has habits (and frustrations) around it, and most of us know the tension between wanting to shop consciously and being constrained by busy schedules or price. That shared experience makes the supermarket an ideal case study: a complex system we can all read, question, and reimagine together.
The real goal of this training and tour is to give you tools you can take anywhere. Using the supermarket as our live example, we will:
Assess where the system falls short: mapping strengths and weaknesses against a broader set of standards, including sustainability, regeneration, and social impact. Learning to define and apply these standards is a skill you can use to evaluate any system, not just a supermarket.
Learn circular economy and nature-inspired design tools: practical methods for redesigning how a system works, which apply just as well to a business, an organisation, a team, or a personal project as they do to a shopping aisle.
Practice turning ideas into feasible solutions: working alongside other participants to move from insight to action, a process that transfers directly to whatever system you're trying to change in your own work or life.
Throughout, we push past the idea that minimising harm is enough. Instead, we train you to design for positive impact — with every decision, not just every sale — so you leave with a mindset and a toolkit for redesigning systems well beyond the supermarket.
Instructors on this workshop:
Lara and Eller team up to explore solutions and exciting ways of combining our techniques and methods of arriving at actions.
Lara: Circular and regenerative business consultant and trainer. I assist SMEs in turning their businesses into an environmental and social asset with healthy profit. I have a particular affinity for finding solutions to replace plastic while lowering cost.
Eller: Cofounder of Think Differently, applying living systems thinking and permaculture to businesses, organisations, and life - to enhance social and environmental impact, foster cultures of innovation, and shift stagnant practices into ones that shape the future. I am passionate about cultivating new perspectives to solve complex challenges and uncover possibilities for the future.