Reducing food waste from online grocery shopping
Sep 2022 - ongoing
More than half of all food waste occurs at home and buying more food than necessary is one of the main reasons. This project aims to investigate how consumers can be convinced to change their behavior from buying too much food to buying enough.
About the Project
The project identified the underlying reasons for overprovisioning as conflicting goals that hold back improvements in behavior. While most of these goals are related to avoiding extra effort, time and money while shopping, this project focused on the goal of providing the family with good, healthy and sufficient food.
The problem identified is the lack of confidence that family providers have in their ability to be a good provider if they bought less. Therefore, they need a shopping experience that makes them feel like a good provider, but also encourages them to learn how to buy enough in their situation.
Steven designed a service for an online grocery store that enables family providers to put meals on the table that deliver the right amount of food without compromising their desire to provide well. It includes creating personalized meal plans tailored to family members’ preferences, as well as suggestions to replace larger packs with smaller ones. A qualitative test suggests that this intervention can successfully help consumers to buy less and improve long-term food provisioning behavior.
