Identifying motivations and barriers to minimising household food waste

By E. Graham-Rowe, D. Jessop, Paul Sparks. 2014

735 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The amount of food discarded by UK households is substantial and, to a large extent, avoidable. Furthermore, such food waste has serious environmental consequences. If household food waste reduction initiatives are to be successful they will need to be informed by people's motivations and barriers to minimising household food waste. This paper reports a qualitative study of the thoughts, feelings and experiences of 15 UK household food purchasers, based on semi-structured interviews. Two core categories of motives to minimise household food waste were identified: (1) waste concerns and (2) doing the ‘right’ thing. A third core category illustrated the importance of food management skills in empowering people to keep household food waste to a minimum. Four core categories of barriers to minimising food waste were also identified: (1) a ‘good’ provider identity; (2) minimising inconvenience; (3) lack of priority; and (4) exemption from responsibility. The wish to avoid experiencing negative emotions (such as guilt, frustration, annoyance, embarrassment or regret) underpinned both the motivations and the barriers to minimising food waste. Findings thus reveal potentially conflicting personal goals which may hinder existing food waste reduction attempts.

Subfields: Food Science, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b05a394b14349e7fe6537ae7aa8de2762a300c0e

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Citations in the corpus

Food Waste Generation at Household Level: Results of a Survey among Employees of Two European Research Centers in Italy and Germany (2015, background): “As reported in different studies [19,21,32,33], consumers see the responsibility for the generation of food waste rather with supermarkets and retailers than with the individual household.”
Household Food Waste Behavior: Avenues for Future Research (2016, background): “High sensitivity to food hygiene (Cox and Downing 2007); concern about food-borne illness (Neff, Spiker, and Truant 2015) Good provider identity (Graham-Rowe et al. 2014; Porpino et al. 2015) Domestic food practices (Evans 2011) Low preference losses (Beretta et al. 2013) Freshness preference (Neff…”
“Reduce Food Waste, Save Money”: Testing a Novel Intervention to Reduce Household Food Waste (2019, background): “…values (Graham-Rowe et al., 2014; Principato et al., 2015; Secondi et al., 2015; Stancu et al., 2016; WRAP, 2011; Watson & Meah, 2012) or guilt (Graham-Rowe et al., 2014; Jagau & Vyrastekova, 2017; Parizeau et al., 2015; Quested et al., 2013; Watson & Meah, 2012), environmental and civic…”
Food waste matters - A systematic review of household food waste practices and their policy implications (2018, background): “Alternatively, consumers may believe their impact to be minimized because of composting food waste or feeding food surplus to their pets (Graham-Rowe et al., 2014; Neff et al., 2015).”
Quantities, Determinants, and Awareness of Households’ Food Waste in Italy: A Comparison between Diary and Questionnaires Quantities’ (2019, result): “Differently from most of the studies that enquired into the motivations to reduce food waste [31,33,46,51], our study compared the motivation with the average food waste reported in diaries, so they are not result of a respondent’s belief but actual waste.”
Drivers of food waste reduction behaviour in the household context (2021, background): “The key theoretical implications of this study are: first, the prior literature has been dominated by qualitative studies with smaller sample sizes, while limited quantitative investigations have been conducted in the context of household food waste (Graham-Rowe et al., 2014; Barone et al., 2019).”
Bringing habits and emotions into food waste behaviour (2017, background): “Others have shown that negative emotions in general can have a positive impact on pro-environmental behaviour (Grob, 1995).”
Food Waste Paradox: Antecedents of Food Disposal in Low-Income Households (2015, positive): “Among what it is known about food waste in families, Graham-Rowe et al. (2014) identified four core barriers to minimizing it as: (1) a ‘good’ provider identity; (2) minimizing inconvenience; (3) lack of priority; and (4) exemption from responsibility.”
Food waste drivers in Europe, from identification to possible interventions (2016, background): “Some studies that found out higher relevance of motivations such as “personal gratification”, “sensation of being in control” or “doing the right thing” also highlighted that people better informed about food and nutrition have less probability of being big food wasters [25,158].”