What Really Explains Why We Waste Food?

We are wired to waste. It’s time we check our biases before we head to the grocery store.

If you’re a consumer who wants to reduce the amount of food ending up in the dumpster or recycling bin, there are conscious choices you can make: store food properly, reduce portion sizes, stick to a shopping list. But what happens unconsciously can have just as big an impact on how much food is wasted.

In one field study, for example, researchers found that people wasted more food when eating from a disposable plate than from a ceramic plate. It seems we associate “disposable plates” with “waste” and “permanent plates” with “consume.”

To really tackle the food waste problem, we need to better understand these sorts of biases that drive consumer behaviour. A team of researchers suggests we focus on the “squander sequence” — four links in the chain of food waste where consumer decisions are responsible for much of the problem.

Point of Sale

Let’s be honest, Western consumers expect unblemished food and pristine packaging. From a psychological viewpoint, it’s perfectly understandable; by instinct, people want to protect themselves from objects that might pose a threat to health or safety.

To address this driver of food waste, consumer education campaigns in Europe are teaching consumers that ugly produce is still edible. A few years ago, the French grocery chain Intermarche launched an Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables television and print campaign that was credited with selling 1.2 million tons of “inglorious” fruits and vegetables in its first two days and increasing store traffic by 24 percent.

As well, apps such as Gander provide consumers with spontaneous discounts at participating restaurants that have overstocked or soon-to-be-discarded food.

Consumer Acquisition Stage

When it comes time to actually purchase our food, biases abound. According to the planning fallacy, we underestimate the amount of time it takes to consume all the food in our shopping baskets. Thanks to general optimism bias, we overestimate the useful life of perishable items. Because of present bias, we buy on impulse and overlook long-term outcomes such as the inconvenience of preparing certain foods. Naive diversification bias drives us to place a high value on variety when standing at grocery store shelves and assessing our options.

If we were more aware of these drivers, presumably we’d be in a better position to make more prudent purchases that reduce food waste.

Consumers, for example, can learn to challenge the idea that larger is necessarily better value and to better plan trips to the grocery store. And policy makers can consider higher taxes for certain types of food or formats to cut down on waste.

Consumption Stage

So we’ve learned to accept blemished food. We can stand up to our biases at the grocery aisle. Our next hurdle: expiration dates. One study estimates that U.S. consumers throw away about half of the food wasted each year, largely because they are confused about the best-before dates on packaging.

Although well-meaning, expiration dates can be more confusing than useful. There are no rules or guidelines for when certain food products are no longer at peak quality. There is wide variation in how these labels are applied and misunderstanding among consumers about what they really mean. The labels are not directly related to food safety, yet 50 percent of consumers incorrectly believe that eating foods after their sell-by or use-by dates can put their health at risk.

There are plenty of ideas for how to standardize date labeling but policy makers need to follow through. Researchers can do their part by studying the effectiveness of discounting food that is nearing its best-before date to see if such a tactic can nudge consumers towards new habits. And enterprising techies can invent new ways to educate consumers about expiration dates and what they mean for different products.

Disposition Stage

Consumer behaviour can confound conventional wisdom. The phenomenon known as the licensing effect shapes consumer attitudes toward composting. According to this effect, people believe that by acting virtuously in one domain they get a free pass to behave less virtuously in another. According to one survey, 41 percent of respondents who compost said they were not bothered when food was wasted.

Consumers may also exhibit biases when attributing the causes of food waste. When they eat out at a restaurant or cafeteria, people tend to attribute food waste to the restaurant or cook. The thinking is that since they don’t control the food portion, they’re not guilty of waste.

Any insights that consumer behaviour researchers can offer to help us remove our blinders when it comes to food waste could not come soon enough. The frustrating reality is that one-third of all food produced globally is wasted. That wasted food could feed some two billion people. In the U.S., more than 40 million people struggle with hunger. That’s the cost of our biases.