Food Waste at Consumer Level ― A Comprehensive Literature Review

This book presents what is the state-of-the-art in the field of the food waste phenomenon at consumer level, including a thorough literature review, and it highlights trends in the field. It provides a comprehensive starting point for future research. Food waste represents a major public policy issue, which is included in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In this context, the present work identifies the most important definitions given to food waste and its environmental, social and economic impacts. With a comprehensive literature review that covers a forty-year time span (1977-2017), this book highlights the multiple, complex facets of food waste at the consumer level. Drawing from behavioural and marketing theories, it proposes a new theoretical framework with the aim to better explain food waste behaviour. Extensive research is being carried out on the main worldwide initiatives (both public and private) and food policies aimed at tackling the phenomenon. 

Ludovica Principato is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Business Studies Department at Roma Tre University, where she also teaches Food and Wine Marketing. She holds a PhD in Management with a research interest in sustainable food systems and in particular in food waste behaviour. She has been working on food waste since 2011; her six year endeavour has already resulted in several publications and a PhD thesis, which focused on food waste behaviour in household consumption. She was a member of the Psychology of Eating and Consumer Health Lab at the Harvard School of Public Health for two years and co-managed a research project on healthy food consumption in collaboration with the HSPH. During 2013-2014, she has been a visiting PhD student at the Institute for Community Health Promotion at Brown University (USA). Before that, she had been a research fellow with a project on food waste at the University of Roma Tre (2011-2013). Since 2011, Ludovica has been a research consultant for the BCFN Foundation. She is also researching consumer health, sustainability and food sharing models.