Food waste can be problematic at all-you-can-eat buffet-style restaurants or university dining halls for obvious reasons: With little incentive to pile less food on their plate, diners tend to overindulge.
Food waste can be problematic at all-you-can-eat buffet-style restaurants or university dining halls for obvious reasons: With little incentive to pile less food on their plate, diners tend to overindulge.
One way to curb such behavior is a food waste-reduction campaign, which serves as a low-cost solution for promoting the virtues of moderation at the buffet line. But according to new research co-written by a University of Illinois expert who studies consumer food choice and behavior, food waste-reduction campaigns in such settings, however well-intentioned, may have limited efficacy.
Research from Brenna Ellison, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at Illinois, indicates that the impact of a food waste-education campaign produced a modest, though not statistically significant, reduction in the average waste per diner in an all-you-can-eat dining setting.
“Food waste can be difficult to combat in all-you-care-to-eat settings like buffets and dining halls,” she said. “Education campaigns can be a low-cost way to make consumers aware of food waste, but they may have smaller impacts on waste behavior. For greater waste reduction, education campaigns may need to be combined with environmental changes such as removing the flat-fee pricing structure or pre-portioning food items.”
Read more at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Image: Food waste campaigns are a low-cost way to curb waste at all-you-can-eat dining establishments, but they may need to be combined with other environmental changes to make a difference, says new research co-written by Brenna Ellison, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at Illinois. (Credit: L. Brian Stauffer)
