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Introduction
Consumers in high-income countries waste food because they can afford to plan poorly, purchase too much, cook too much and throw away edible food when not fitting their momentary consumption preference (Ventour, 2008; Silvennoinen et al., 2014). This is in contrast to consumers in low-income countries who are budget constrained and “buy today – consume today.” In the long chain between production and consumption, there are multiple stages at which some form of loss, spillage, waste or loss of food might take place, be it in production, storage, distribution or during actual consumption. Nevertheless, the most influential factor of food waste in rich countries is consumer behavior (Gustavson et al., 2011; Secondi et al., 2015).
Food waste is an economic and environmental problem (Hall et al., 2009). In the Netherlands, the country of our study, every person threw away on average about 83-151 kg of edible food in 2009 (Soethoudt and Timmermans, 2013) worth of about 150 euro (Van Westerhoven, 2013). A number of campaigns have been launched in the Netherlands addressing food waste. “Milieu Centraal” and “No Waste Network,” for instance, are initiatives funded by the government that provide information and help consumers to make choices resulting in food waste reduction. Despite standing high on the priority of the political agenda, food waste is far from being tackled effectively as is reflected in no significant reduction in food waste in the Netherlands between 2009 and 2013 (Soethoudt and Timmermans, 2013).
Parfitt et al. (2010) identify the role of consumers among the greatest potentials for reducing food waste in the developed world. To achieve this goal, they propose that behavioral approaches are promising. They could help by increasing the awareness of the problem among consumers and play a role in imputing positive value on food preservation. While food could be perceived as abundant when valuing it at the purchase price, the value including the social and environmental costs might motivate consumers to invest effort into conservation.
Importantly, when hoping to have an impact inside of the households where the food is wasted, governments can hardly rely on traditional forms of intervention and enforcement, even though economic factors affect food waste in a predictable way (Abeliotis et al., 2014). Behavioral insights...