How Studying Online with Wharton Inspired Me to Reimagine Lithuania’s Food Deserts

Whenever I travel anywhere by car, my family has to decide on a place to grab lunch. Almost all the options are well-known fast-food restaurants, like McDonald’s or KFC. The only other options available between Russia and Lithuania — the two countries I live in — are small cafés, where the food isn’t always the best.

I crave healthier options! Just give me a brown rice bowl with crispy chicken, lettuce, zucchini, cherry tomatoes and shredded carrots – maybe topped with a refreshing mint sauce. I’ll take that over a burger and fries in a paper bag any day.

Waiting for Food on Campus
I had the chance to explore how to make changes to existing markets and products in the summer of 2024 as a student in the online Future of the Business World (FBW) program, a two-week online program delivered by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

During FBW my project group (four high school students from Lithuania, China, the U.S. and India), did business simulations and learned about the “copy and improve” method of product development – basically identifying successful business practices and using them to improve upon something that already exists.

We were tasked with thinking about improvements for the Penn restaurants on the school’s Philadelphia campus, based on the various issues that Penn students expressed. We then had to present our innovative ideas to other groups. We were given an opportunity to interview our teaching assistants – all Wharton and Penn students — and could use that information to identify patterns of problems to solve.

The main issue that Penn students struggled with was time spent waiting for food in long lines. Our group began imagining an app for Penn students in which they would be able to order their desired meals in advance. They could indicate the approximate time they wanted to pick up their food, so that they could come at the specific time and grab their order without having to wait.

We concluded from our research that time is an especially important factor for customers, and therefore also for restaurants as they consider good service strategies.

This project got me thinking about how to “copy and improve” the fast-food restaurants that are everywhere in Lithuania.  How could healthier restaurants learn from the popular fast-food model and work to improve customer service, enhance convenience, popularity and brand loyalty?

During my time in Future of the Business World, I talked these ideas over with my project group and researched economics to guide our ideas. Here’s how I see these concepts connecting to my quest for healthy eating options during my trips between Russia and Lithuania:

Speed It Up
When you think about scarcity in economics, resources like goods, services and time are limited, while demand is unlimited. Businesses have to make choices about what to produce and how to produce it in order to meet the ongoing demand of their customers. We confirmed in FBW that students crave shorter lines and faster service. Of course this is true for many of us. Think about it — how often have you considered the speed of food delivery or meal preparation at a restaurant while deciding where you want to eat?

Back to expanding restaurant options on my family road trips. Healthy restaurants that are looking to enter the market and compete with fast-food restaurants should increase the speed of their food delivery. So, I thought about adapting my FBW app research to the market at home. To test how much customers would value high-speed service for healthy food, I created a survey for 40 of my friends, family, and classmates of all ages. Survey results suggested that customers would strongly prefer eating at a healthy restaurant if it had a fast delivery or service time: 97.5% of the survey participants claimed that the main reason they settled for fast food instead of healthier restaurants was to save time. Speed it up and, at least in my world, diners will choose healthy over greasy.

Highlight Value
Our FBW group also touched on the concept of elastic goods, or products that have a significant change in demand when their price changes. Many people choose fast food because of the low-cost menu items. So, healthier restaurants should just lower prices to be successful in a market crowded with fast-food options, right? That’s not always economically realistic, due to the higher cost of healthy ingredients and other factors. In the end, it comes down to value. Even if the price of healthier options is higher than in the average fast-food restaurant, people are more likely to choose healthy if they understand why they are paying extra money for the meal. Lower prices were not a key determinant in my survey results: 12.5% of people would pay 20% more and 87.5% of people would pay 30% or more for healthier restaurant options. The restaurants’ job? Make sure customers understand and appreciate what’s driving the higher prices – amplify the added value.

These are just a few of the ideas that started in FBW and came out of my summer with Wharton Global Youth. It was fun to think about how we might innovate to tackle problems we observed in the world – and to do the actual hands-on research that helped us understand the markets and how to meet the needs of our target audience. In my case, that problem is food deserts, where it’s hard to find healthy-eating options.

My new interest in economics, innovation, and market research feels like a first step toward creating better quality restaurant options in Lithuania and Russia. Maybe someday? But for now, Future of the Business World has helped me to see my world differently.

Alena Z., 16, is a sophomore at Crimson Global Academy and lives in Vilnius, Lithuania. She studied online in Wharton Global Youth’s Future of the Business World in the summer of 2024.

Hero Image shot by Fellipe Ditadi of Unsplash