The Effect of Sell-by Dates on Purchase Volume and Food Waste

“Progress and Challenges in Empirical Food Waste Research” – Authors' Response to Comment

“…They provide a theoretical model that shows the effects of food policies on food purchase and food waste depend crucially on both demand elasticity and the curvature of the waste‐reduction cost function. Their theoretical results are confirmed by the empirical analysis in Yu and Jaenicke (2020b), where the authors show an extension of sell‐by dates in milk products reduces food waste only if demand is price inelastic. Lusk and Ellison (2017) present a single‐category conceptual model of households producing meals from purchased food and emphasize the role of time as an input in this production process.…”

Consumer Food Waste: Understanding Why Consumers Do Not Eat the Food They Acquire

“…Within Europe, individual consumers are responsible for over 50% of the total amount of food waste (Stenmarck et al 2016;Xue et al 2017). Estimates are that consumers waste around 10-30% of the food they acquire (Buzby and Hyman 2012;WRAP 2017;Yu and Jaenicke 2020), which translates to an average of over 200 kilograms of food waste by an average household per year (Parfitt et al 2010;Quested and Johnson 2009). Hence, consumers are literally wasting their own money by squandering the food they acquired themselves.…”

“…-Food is mainly acquired via the grocery store and mainly prepared and/or in part consumed in the household (Van Geffen et al 2016). -Consumers waste between 10-30% of the food they acquire within the household, with up to 57% being labeled avoidable (Buzby and Hyman 2012;WRAP 2017;Yu and Jaenicke 2020). -Financial losses caused by the wastage of food at home are about 9.2% of a consumer's food spending (Buzby et al 2014).…”

“…Survey measures can be subject to social desirability (Van Herpen et al 2019b), and directly asking consumers about their waste behavior may make them more conscious of their behavior (Parizeau, von Massow, and Martin 2015), possibly leading to underreporting of the amount of food wasted (Neff, Spiker, and Truant 2015;Van der Werf et al 2019). Questionnaires are useful when the aim is to investigate consumer attitudes and effects of household-specific characteristics or to investigate differences between households and within households across time rather than attempting to accurately estimate the amount of food waste (Van Herpen et al 2019b;Yu and Jaenicke 2020). Hence, when the aim is to obtain accurate waste amounts, expending extra resources and applying actual garbage collection and weighing to measure food waste may therefore be most constructive.…”

“…In developed countries, consumers are the single biggest producers of food waste (Beretta et al 2013;Buzby, Wells, and Hyman 2014;Parfitt, Barthel, and Macnaughton 2010;Priefer, Jörissen, and Bräutigam 2016). Within Europe, consumers are responsible for over 50% of the total amount of food waste (Stenmarck et al 2016;Xue et al 2017) and discard an estimated 30% of the food they purchase (Buzby and Hyman 2012;Yu and Jaenicke 2020). A considerable amount of food is wasted at home: households produce an average of over 200 kilograms of food waste per year per household (Parfitt et al 2010;Quested and Johnson 2009), with perishable products such as vegetables, fruit, bread, and meat being the most likely to be wasted (Buzby et al 2014;De Laurentiis, Corrado, and Sala 2018;WRAP 2012)-some studies report that up to 60% of the food wasted is generated by these categories (Vanham et al 2015).…”