Methodological Approaches to Tackling Food Waste: Moving the Agenda Forward

Abstract

The causes of FLW are connected across food supply chains, from primary production to final consumption (Bilska, Wrzosek, Kołożyn-Krajewska, & Krajewski, 2016;Canali et al., 2017). Consequently, research into FLW has emerged as a priority issue for both academics and practitioners. Much of the research, however, focuses on just one activity in the food supply chain, not on the interactions between the different stakeholders, or on the complex phenomenon of FLW. FLW is a transdisciplinary topic, but a large area of interest in business and management comes from marketing (the majority of studies that analyze consumer food waste) and operations management literature. These two units of analysis and the methodological trends used in studying them are discussed below. Consumer sideDifferent methods are used for measuring consumer food waste, such as self-report surveys, food waste diaries, photo coding, and waste composition analysis (Quested, Palmer, Moreno, McDermott, & Schumacher, 2020).Given the need to standardize quantification across different countries as a means of tracking achievement of its Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, the United Nations Environment Programme suggests using waste composition analysis, and direct measurement in households via scales, or diaries. Diaries are useful for food that goes down

Reducing food waste by simply measuring it: insights from interventions to reduce household food waste

“…The Covid-19 pandemic has increased food insecurity and raised debates regarding hunger in Brazil (Vieira et al. , 2021) as well as demanded strategies for improving food resilience from people (Bender et al ., 2022).…”

“…The Covid-19 pandemic has increased food insecurity and raised debates regarding hunger in Brazil (Vieira et al, 2021) as well as demanded strategies for improving food resilience from people (Bender et al, 2022). Due to the increase in hunger and to reduce food loss and waste, in June 2020, the Brazilian government sanctioned bill number 14.016 (IBGE, 2021), regarding food waste and food donation for human consumption.…”