WSU marketing professor seeks to better understand food waste

Wayne State University Mike Ilitch School of Business assistant marketing professor Andrea Tangari has co-authored an article that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, which is published by the American Marketing Association.

The article, which is titled “The Squander Sequence: Understanding Food Waste at Each Stage of the Consumer Decision Making Process.,” focuses on examining what the drivers of food waste are at the consumer level and what some of the psychological reasons may be behind food waste at the consumer level.

“We hope this research helps to drive more studies in this area to help understand the problem of food waste so that we can work on finding ways to reduce food waste,” Tangari said, adding that she decided to write about food waste because of the pressing issue it has become.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year – approximately 1.3 billion tons – gets lost or wasted.

“Two major focus areas of my research have always been around marketing issues relating to food and food consumption, and to promoting sustainable behavior,” she said. “This current research is an intersection of these two areas: sustainability and the use of food. So, it is a perfect blend of subject areas that I have always been interested in.”

Here is a complete abstract of the article:

“Food waste presents a complex global problem, involving multiple actors and institutions within the aggregate food marketing system. In this research, the authors distinguish between two conceptually distinct components of food waste within the system: food loss, which occurs prior to the consumer decision making stages, and food squander, which encompasses consumer pre-acquisition, acquisition, consumption, and disposition behaviors. We identify specific behavioral theories that underlie stages in the squander sequence with the ultimate goal of encouraging future research capable of deriving transformative consumer solutions to the substantive food waste issue.”

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