The food sector aims to provide people with food anywhere, anytime. Food waste happens in every step of the process of getting food from producers to consumers. It doesn’t stop there. Consumers have a tendency to focus on having plenty of food in inventory at home. They tend to buy more than they eat, with food waste as a result.
Worldwide a third of the food that is produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. A third. The overall food system needs to change as well as the way in which people treat food. This is where our project FETE comes in.
Our project “Food Waste: from Excess to Enough” has developed a roadmap towards a food system with minimal food waste. We examined three lines of research:
(1) dynamics in the food system
(2) the supply side (retailing)
(3) the demand side (consumers)
At the food system level, the main problem is the focus on the excessive availability of food. To drive sales, the whole food system caters towards consistently offering plenty of food to consumers. In the FETE project, we developed a vision of a food system that is adaptable and embraces flexibility, as a way to re-frame the system focus towards providing enough.
A solution to the oversupply of specific food products is to ‘push’ the products towards consumers, especially when these products are close to expiration. The question is how consumers respond: will they buy and, most importantly, also consume products in oversupply? Our project identified both how consumers can be stimulated to buy and consume products in oversupply.
Excessive purchasing is an issue on the demand side, where consumers buy more food than they need. We found that the “good provider identity”, the idea that you need to provide and care for the needs of your family and guests by ensuring that there is more than enough food, triggers such excessive purchasing. Food swap suggestions with a food waste reduction message help to reduce purchasing quantities.
This project received funding from NWO. Project partners are Wageningen University, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, TU Delft, Voedingscentrum, Stichting Samen Tegen Voedselverspilling, Hello Fresh, ACV, Iglo, Hak, EFMI, and Capgemini.
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