Business Incentive to Reduce Food Losses in Japan

Jun Igeta,Hiroki Nakamura

doi:10.3390/su14042266

Abstract

Although market-based or new business solutions such as food sharing services are important to reduce food wastage, a limited amount of people use sharing economy services, such that real restaurant services are scarce in countries such as Japan. Moreover, while the perspectives of consumer and food wasting behavior in restaurants, doggy bags, and new sharing business applications are important, existing studies related to food loss have not focused on these issues all together in an analytic model. Therefore, this study proposes a new business incentive model to reduce food loss, and we further analyze the feasibility and potential of our proposal by extending the existing basic analytic model. The proposed service is to provide coupons or points in digital applications if customers finish their meal at a restaurant without wasting food; these coupons/points can be used to avail discounts on their future meals. We considered three models of intention to use incentives to reduce food loss and compared new business proposals with the other two incentive services. The results showed that the proposed services are less likely to be used by people who are interested in but do not experience using food sharing services. Nevertheless, the proposed new service has the potential to be used by younger people and people with household incomes ranging from 5 to 10 million yen, indicating that such services have the potential to create a new target group for food loss implementation and a business that encourages a strategy to reduce food loss.

Highlights

In recent years, technological innovations have made our lives more comfortable.despite this, we continue to face various complex social problems, which have attracted international attention
Morone et al [11] performed a statistical analysis to assess the effectiveness of food sharing services to reduce food loss and waste, and the results showed that the introduction of food sharing services by households does not automatically translate into reduced wastage of food
This study proposes a new food loss reduction service for restaurants called “Canshoku.” The service corresponds to Group 6 in Tables 1 and 2 and provides coupons or points in digital applications if customers finish their meals at a restaurant; these points can be redeemed to avail discounts on their meal

Summary

Introduction

Technological innovations have made our lives more comfortable.despite this, we continue to face various complex social problems, which have attracted international attention. In 2015, the United Nations set sustainable development goals (SDGs) to address social problems such as food loss and avoid wastage of food. FUSIONS [1] listed various definitions related to food loss and waste, whereas the. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) [2] has defined that food losses “refer to the decrease in edible food mass throughout the part of the supply chain that leads to edible food for human consumption and occurs at production, postharvest and processing stages in the food supply chain”. FAO [2] noted that “food losses occurring at the end of the food chain (retail and final consumption) are instead called ‘food wastage’, which relates to the behavior of retailers and consumers”. Gustavson et al [4] estimated that one-third of the global food production is either lost or wasted; some studies, such as

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