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1. Introduction
Food is an essentially physiological need and is crucial to human survival. However, as the statistics affirm, populations in many countries lack food. In its annual report, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2020) estimated that approximately 690 million people are starving. Annual deaths from hunger and related diseases have reached around 9 million worldwide compared to around 60 million deaths for all other reasons (Our World in Data, 2019). During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns led to the economic downturn of businesses and markets (Ozili and Arun, 2020), with companies going bankrupt, incomes decreasing, homelessness increasing and, as a result, an even greater number of food-needy people.
However, co-existing with the severity of the situation is a huge amount of food loss and waste (FLW). Referring to FAO's (2021a) definition, FLW is the decrease in quantity or quality of food along the food supply. In particular, “food loss occurs along the food supply chain from harvest up to, but not including the retail level”, while “food waste occurs at the retail and consumption levels”. About 14% of global food is lost (FAO, 2021b) and 17% of food production is wasted worldwide (Kafa and Jaegler, 2021). The BIO-Intelligence Service (2013) statistics indicate that annual global food waste is valued at around 750 billion USD. The richest country, the USA, produced annual waste of more than $161 billion, equal to around 60 billion kg in weight, and in Europe, around 88 billion kg (Stenmarck et al., 2016). According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, 2021), “if food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions”.
To reduce food waste, studies have been launched, and their recommendations include household storage (van Holsteijn and Kemna, 2018), cooking guidance (Kim et al., 2020) and waste recycling (Lang et al., 2020). Many entities in the food industry have dramatically increased their productivity with the help of the digital economy and information technology (IT) applications (Kurpayanidi, 2020). People used web-based platforms to share leftover food and meal information to avoid food waste (Zurek, 2016). Engineers can monitor foodstuff information, including farming, production, delivery, storage and nutritional status using mobiles rather computers or manufacturing devices (Kabir