Transformative Food Safety Training for Farmers Market Vendors: The game design process
- Matheus Cezarotto
- Mar 20
- 3 min read
In early 2024, the Learning Games Lab team began working on the design of a game to support essential food safety learning for farmers market vendors. Our goal was to find the knowledge gaps, utilize science-based standards to develop the game, and evaluate the success of the game in providing food safety training.
Funded by the USDA, this multistate project (including partners in Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico) was led by Dr. Kristen Gibson, Director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Arkansas.
Vendors at farmers' markets, whether they operate on a small, medium, or large scale, share a common enthusiasm for their products. These food entrepreneurs prioritize the quality they offer, emphasizing taste and freshness. In many cases, they are selling family recipes or locally produced goods. Despite their excitement, all vendors offering various products—from fresh items to ready-to-eat products—need training on food safety practices. It's essential to ensure that their products and the practices surrounding their handling are safe for consumers. Research has revealed that vendors claim to understand food safety, but their behavior does not always reflect that understanding, indicating a need for transformative training.
The process of designing Ready Set Go! began with a two-day design summit led by the Learning Games Lab team, where researchers, context experts, and game developers immersed themselves in the farmers market vendors’ training needs, knowledge gaps, and intended behavior changes. Guided by research, the team outlined the project audience content needs and intended changes to happen after they used the game intervention. After two days, the team discussed a plan to design a Tycoon-style game set in a farmers market, where players managed a farmers market and faced various food safety challenges through mini-games. The goal was that, after playing the game, players would:
Understand the risks around their produce and product, but also learn that they can reduce the risks with food safety practice.
Understand the importance of food safety by seeing the connection between not making people sick and the quality of their products.
Feel self-confident and empowered to take action towards food safety, which is doable and important.
As a result of the summit, the team defined a production timeline, organized into design, development, and release phases.
In the following months, the team dove into the design phase. The development team met weekly to better define gameplay, approach, complexity and integration of food safety content. During the design phase, the development team met with food safety content experts during checkpoint meetings to get feedback on design ideas and ensure the content was correct. From the first very meeting, the team kept accessibility in mind, designing a gameplay experience that can be played by a wide range of users, considering their visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive needs.
The player’s goal in the game is to successfully manage a market for safety and profit. Players can create appealing stands to attract customers, offer various products for sale, take action on food safety issues as they arise, and use their profits to expand, including by adding decorative elements and bonus art, music, and flower kiosks. Players can add ten different food stands, ranging from fresh produce to ready-to-eat products. Each stand brings specific food safety issues and challenges, mapped out with context experts, including personal hygiene, cross-contamination, temperature abuse, and labeling & packaging. Social media-style posts communicate to players when a stand has a food safety issue that needs to be addressed. To solve the food safety issues, players need to solve various mini-games.
Currently, the game is in the development phase. This means that most of the design phase is complete, and the team has made significant progress on designing art assets and game coding. During this phase, the team performs formative user testing with the game, testing the interface, content clarity, and gameplay experience.
Once tested and implemented, the game will be released to the public and promoted in social media campaigns, extension talks, and conference presentations. Additionally, once released, the team starts a summative assessment, using research to measure the game’s impact on the final intended audience, evaluating knowledge and behavior change.
Ready Set Go! is slated to be released in June 2025. We hope you'll play it!
Written by Matheus Cezarotto, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Innovative Media Research and Extension.
