Food Wastage as a Display of Consumer Behaviour

Abstract

The article deals with consumer behavior in terms of food and its wastage. The main aim is to identify consumer behavior in relation to food consumption and food waste in the households in the Czech Republic as an effect of healthy competitive environment. Food consumption and its wastage is analyzed in terms of quantity and food expenditure in general as well as with the use of primary data from the Household Budget Survey. According to a household diary survey, the highest wastage is of cereal and dairy products, with the lowest being meat. The consumption and quantity of wasted food are significant in relation to price. The data obtained during daily monitoring of wasted food in September 2018 are used to test the impact of the household identification characteristics on the quantity of wasted food along with the types. A logit regression is used to estimate the anticipated quantity of wasted food according to individual kinds of food and in relation to household identification characteristics. The age, education and economic activity of consumers have a significant effect on the quantity of wasted food. In addition, the results show that the people who waste the most are over 65 years of age, with the lowest wastage connected with university graduates.

Environmental and Political Determinants of Food Choices: A Preliminary Study in a Croatian Sample

“…Similar results were obtained in recent studies performed in Poland [61] and Hungary [46]. On the contrary, according to recent studies, people with a university degree wasted food less often in Czech [49], Egypt [69], and Lebanon [70].…”

“…In contrast, in some studies age did not have significant influence [47,48]. Moreover, a study on food waste in households in the Czech Republic showed that the people who waste food the most were those older than 65 years [49]. The explanation for these observed differences may be that different causes of food waste (e.g., impulse buying, lack of planning, understanding of date labels, and knowledge of proper storage practices) are affected differently by age.…”

“…Regarding food waste, according to the literature, gender has different influences on practices. Some studies found that men are prone to wasting more food than women [36,[59][60][61], others stated that gender had no significant influence [44,46,47,49], whereas some studies revealed that women wasted more food than men [48,62]. It seems that there is a conflict between good-provider identity or a "good mother" behavior and awareness of the negative consequences of wasting food [63].…”

The Impact of Brand on Consumer Preferences of Milk in Online Purchases: Conjoint Analysis Approach

“…The consumption of milk and dairy products in their natural form consists of 42% of household food consumption (Hazuchová et al, 2020), so milk can be considered a significant commodity in household food purchases. The study was focused on long-life semi-skimmed milk as the most often purchased type of milk in the Czech market (Kopáček, 2018).…”

Eat or Throw Away? Factors Differentiating High Food Wasters from Low Food Wasters

“…Most studies have reported the negative correlation between age and the amount of food waste produced at the household level: the older the people, the less they report wasting [13,18,29,46,[55][56][57][59][60][61]. Other studies have found opposite results, indicating that the production of food waste increases with age [54] or persons aged 65 years or over waste the most [62]. There are also studies that have reported no significant relationship between age and the amount of food wasted in households [28,40,58].…”