Abstract
American households discard a significant amount of food that represent a sizable portion of their food expenditures. This study adds to our understanding of product attributes associated with food waste, with a focus on cosmetic deterioration during home storage. Specifically, we profile a sample of U.S. individuals by patterns of common food-related behaviors and determine the effects of product attributes on food waste tendencies at the point of consumption by distinct behavioral profiles. An interactive survey at the Minnesota State Fair (N = 333) was used to obtain measurements on food-related behavior and sociodemographic factors. The survey included a conjoint task to elicit food discard tendencies to construct the food waste proxy. The study considered cosmetic deterioration, date labels, implied shelf life, package size, and prices paid, in fresh, packaged spinach and ground beef products. Factor analysis and latent class modeling categorized the sample into two classes, revealing distinct food-related behavioral patterns. Planners, who constituted a slight majority in our sample, were likely to have established pre-shopping and in-store behavior and food management and cooking skills. Extemporaneous Consumers had inferior food handling routines and were less knowledgeable and skilled in the kitchen. Regression analysis using a random-effects tobit model showed Extemporaneous Consumers were prone to waste a greater portion of the spinach product than Planners. Otherwise, both classes showed similar increases in likelihood to discard the products, as their appearance deteriorated. Their tendency to waste increased with shorter remaining shelf life for spinach but not for ground beef, and was not affected by the date label type. Results suggest an intervention that targets a general audience designed to enhance people’s skills to discern edibility of food in home storage by manipulating sensory expectations from cosmetic deterioration could be impactful in efforts to curtail food waste.
Highlights
Food waste has garnered much attention in local and global policy circles, as research continues to highlight its negative impacts on the environment
Understanding contributors to food discarding habits has been a shared goal of consumer food waste research efforts, which were pioneered by Cox and Downing [33] in the UK and NRDC [15] in the U.S A handful of reviews of recent developments in the literature reveal similar classification of factors [9,10,34,35], distinguishing behavioral factors in response to the food environment from factors that shape the environment
In addition to cosmetic deterioration, our study focus, the following food product attributes were selected for the study from the attributes that have been associated with waste tendencies: expiration date type, days to expiration date, package size, and price purchased
Summary
Food waste has garnered much attention in local and global policy circles, as research continues to highlight its negative impacts on the environment. We examine the role of cosmetic appearance of food on point-of-consumption decisions to discard, relative to other product attributes such as date labels that have recently been studied [23,24,25,26], by eliciting food waste tendencies using a conjoint task. Our regression results showed that Extemporaneous Consumers had higher tendencies to waste than Planners in the case of spinach, but two groups responded in a similar manner to product characteristics. As cosmetic appearance of the food product deteriorated, people showed higher tendencies to consume less spinach and substantially less of ground beef, suggesting higher levels of potential waste, even though the product remained edible and safe to consume. Food waste tendency was unaffected by the type of date labeling or package size
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