How We Unwittingly Waste Food

Call me an optimist, but I believe humans mostly operate with the best intentions, even though the outcomes may suggest otherwise. Food waste is a good example. When we go to the grocery store, we don’t shop with the idea that we will throw away a certain percentage of the food we are buying. And yet, it happens. According to the Food Marketing Institute, every $1000 generated by grocery retailers results in 10 pounds of wasted food. 

In trying to understand the disconnect between our well-meaning intentions with food, and the reality of food waste, I’ve turned to research on marketing and psychology and come up with something I call the squander sequence. The squander sequence is my name for the drivers of food waste at each point on the consumer’s journey from shopping to disposal. Below, I list each stage of the squander sequence and explain how food waste occurs in that context. 

Retail Point of Sale

The point-of-sale environment represents the intersection between producers and consumers, and it is here that marketing activities most directly influence consumers and initiate the squander sequence. Point of sale venues in the food distribution system include both retail (e.g., grocery stores, convenience stores, warehouse stores, farmers markets, vending, and online purchases) and food service settings (e.g. restaurants, cafeterias, and hospitals).

At point-of-sale, marketers are pursuing operational efficiencies to reduce food waste and thus lower their own costs, while at the same time encouraging and reinforcing consumer spending, which may contribute to food waste.

One way food waste is initiated at the point of sale is by consumers’ bias against produce with imperfect or blemished appearances. With consumer preferences in mind, retailers sort through produce for the prettiest specimens, and what’s left in the boxes goes to waste.

To address this driver of food waste, consumer education campaigns, like those initiated in Europe, can teach consumers that ugly produce is still very much edible. The French grocery chain Intermarche’s “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” television and print campaign, which uses bright graphics and photos to present malformed fruits and vegetables in a positive light, was credited with selling 1.2 million tons of “inglorious” fruits and vegetables in its first two days and increased store traffic by 24 percent.

Consumer Acquisition: Biases in Consumer Planning and Shopping

The psychological underpinnings of food waste at the acquisition stage relate to consumer behavior in planning and shopping.

Consumers are notoriously poor planners, with literature showing, for example, that individuals often misestimate inventory at home, in turn leading them to over-purchase food that is already on hand. More generally, consumers in many contexts fall victim to the planning fallacy, which is a tendency to underestimate how much time will be needed to complete a future task. In the context of food acquisition, this might lead to consumers underestimating the amount of time it would take to consume all the food in one’s shopping basket, leading to the purchase of items that go unused, and are hence wasted.

In a shopping context, the present bias might lead to over-acquisition, as consumers overweigh the immediate benefit or rewards of acquiring an appealing food product (e.g., taste, visual appeal) compared to the long-term outcomes of their purchases (e.g., nutrition, preparation). As previously mentioned, retailers’ deliberately appealing product aesthetics and displays may increase a consumer’s desire for immediate gratification without thought of when or how a product will be prepared or consumed. Moreover, since visual cues—such as plate color and size—may encourage consumers to fill their plates in a food service context factors wholly unrelated to the food itself can contribute to increased food waste.

Consumption

Once food has been purchased, the consumer is faced with additional consumption-related decisions—for instance, which foods to eat, prepare, or serve. The psychology and consumer behavior literature highlights a variety of contextual and motivational factors that might influence these decisions and, in turn, influence food waste.

For instance, relying on the availability heuristic leads consumers to make decisions based on what comes to mind most easily when evaluating a decision. So, when making decisions about what food to consume (e.g., what to eat for dinner), food that was purchased most recently (and therefore likely stored in a more visible location within one’s refrigerator, freezer, or pantry) is likely to be more accessible both in terms of physical proximity and in memory; it is therefore more likely to be selected for consumption. This is particularly true when decisions are made from memory, relative to a more “on-line” decision process made with all information available (e.g., after evaluating items in the refrigerator or pantry). Reliance on this heuristic is a potential driver of food waste as it reduces the likelihood of utilizing a “first in, first out” strategy for foods, which would help to ensure that older items that are closer to spoilage are used before newer ones.

In the motivational realm, the “how do I feel about it” heuristic, which describes the mental shortcut in which an individual’s current emotional state (e.g., pleasure, fear) drives decisions, is another potential factor in the decision to consume a food. For instance, consumers may rely on discrete emotions like disgust for an “expired” food rather than on more cognitive assessments, like consuming older food items before newer ones. Disgust can also arise when consumable food becomes “contaminated” in the consumer’s mind due to proximity to other items deemed disgusting (e.g., a disliked food item or food consumed by another person).

Disposition: Deliberate and Unintentional Biases

Oftentimes, household waste can be repurposed for other uses. One example is composting, which offers many environmental benefits: the city of San Francisco enacted a mandatory composting program, resulting in significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. However, a 2015 survey indicated that 41 percent of respondents who compost said that because they compost they were not bothered by wasting food. This behavior is indicative of a phenomenon commonly known as the licensing effect, in which consumers’ virtuous choices and behavior (e.g., composting) may license less virtuous behaviors (e.g., wasting food).

The manner in which consumers categorize food types may impact food waste at disposition. Categorization theory suggests consumers generate internal categories for objects (like foods) based on repeated associations over time. In the present context, ad-hoc categories related to food are likely to be strong determinants of its destiny—consumption or disposition. One relevant study showed that more food is thrown away when a meal is eaten from a disposable (i.e., paper) versus permanent plate. This is due to the development of categorical links between “permanent plates and consume” and between “disposable plates and waste,” in part because of the conditioned experiences of throwing away disposable plates along with the food that remains on them. Importantly, consumers are not intentionally disposing of more food simply because of the disposable nature of the plate; rather, they are unaware of this subtle nudge towards disposal.

Finally, perhaps the most pervasive unintentional behaviors, and thus the most difficult to overcome, are those driven by habit. Habits can be thought of as heuristics in that they are simplifying strategies that reduce the effort consumers need to put into decision making. Habits can lead to unnecessary disposition if, for example, consumers habitually discard food parts (e.g., the end slices of bread, the stems of vegetables). Maladaptive habitual cooking behaviors can also increase food waste. For example, many consumers buy ingredients for a particular recipe and then throw out any unused, yet still consumable, portion simply because they are not in the habit of using that ingredient in other ways. Fear of not having enough or trouble estimating portion sizes leads to habitually cooking excess food; in an online survey of 1,200 consumers, 25 percent agreed that food waste comes primarily from over-preparing food, with 20 percent of respondents indicating that they prepare more than they plan to consume “just in case.”

Certainly creating disruptions to the context surrounding food decisions is essential to breaking bad habits and developing less wasteful new ones in the context of food disposition.

Next week, I will dig into other drivers of food waste, from evolutionary theory to decision making behavior.

This post is part of our “Reclaim” initiative, which showcases solutions to the issue of food waste and engages our readers to take action. You can find all the posts in this initiative, as well as feature pieces, investigative stories and video, here . Follow the initiative on Twitter at #Reclaim. And if you’d like to add your own thoughts to our series, sign up here  for a HuffPost blog account.