Reducing food waste from online grocery shopping

Abstract

With more than half of all food waste taking place at home, a transition in our consumer behaviour is needed if we want a future with less waste. While supermarkets and food producers have strong incentives and have the tools to reduce waste on their side, consumers seem to be less concerned about wasting food. However, they are also caught in a complex web of conflicting goals and desires that stand in the way of behaviour change. Food waste is a result of avoiding time and effort, being unaware of its consequences, and experiencing a moral obligation to be a 'good provider'. This desire to provide our partners, families or guests with good and enough food suppresses our moral intentions to reduce waste. Changing behaviour requires confidence in the ability to do so. For family providers, this means feeling confident in being a good provider, and in their ability to minimise overprovisioning. To bridge this vision and the design phase, an interaction vision was developed, stating that interacting with the design should feel like a safety net, discovering new things, and learning by doing. This translates into a design that is reliable, spontaneous, and intuitive. Building on the findings from literature, interviews, and other exploration methods, several design iterations were made based on the following principles: to facilitate creative meal planning and the use of leftovers, to elicit our aversion to wasting money, to provide space to express identity, and finally to align being a good provider with buying enough. The final design is a service in the 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 involves creating personalised meal plans tailored to the preferences of the family members, as well as suggestions for substituting larger products for smaller ones. The qualitative test suggests that the intervention can successfully help providers to buy less and achieve behaviour change in the long term, mainly by reconsidering the items in their shopping basket. Through this design, this project explored a sub-solution to the systemic problem of food waste, specifically aimed at online grocery shoppers and their good provider identities.