Estimating Food Waste as Household Production Inefficiency

Abstract

Measuring food waste at the individual household level has been nearly impossible because comprehensive, current data on uneaten food do not exist. By using food acquisition data, this article employs a new approach to estimating household‐level food waste via a stochastic production frontier model in which food waste is identified as input inefficiency. For households in our data, the average household wastes 31.9% of the food it buys, and this figure, using survey weights, translates to annual U.S. consumer‐level food waste valued at $240 billion. In addition, by accommodating heterogeneous wasting behavior, we find that healthier diets and higher income lead to more household food waste, whereas lower household food security, food‐assistance program participation, and larger household sizes are associated with less food waste.

Removing plastic packaging from fresh produce – what’s the impact?

“…As well as the environmental significance, reducing fruit and vegetable waste may be particularly important for health (if it were to result in increased consumption) as meeting the 5 A DAY recommendation could help reduce risk of heart disease, stroke and some cancers (WHO/FAO ). Interestingly, analysis carried out using US data has indicated that those with a healthier diet actually generate more food waste than those with less healthy diets, likely due to the high perishability of fruit and vegetables (Yu & Jaenicke ). Higher income and food security was also associated with more food waste in this study.…”

Economics of household food waste

“…Yu and Jaenicke (2020) utilized food purchase and acquisition data from over 4,000 U.S. consumers from USDA National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) to calculate caloric purchases and compared it to estimated caloric need based on individuals’ weights and energy expenditures, among other variables. They then estimated an efficiency frontier relating the minimum amount of food inputs needed to achieve a given energy expenditure.…”

“…Individuals off the frontier are inefficient in their food use, and greater inefficiency is argued to be tantamount to greater food waste. Yu and Jaenicke (2020) estimated that the average percentage of food wasted across all households was 31.9%. They found that their measures of food waste were positively correlated with income, food security, and healthier diets and was falling in household size and distance traveled to the retail outlet.…”

“…They used data from over 2,000 households’ responses to the 1977–1978 U.S. Nationwide Food Consumption Survey (NFCS), where households reported both food input usage and meal consumption, allowing for a direct calculation of waste as the difference between estimated household food stocks and calories consumed by the household. They found that calculated food waste was positively correlated with total food expenditures and was negatively correlated with food price and household size, confirming some of the results in Yu and Jaenicke (2020). Landry and Smith (2019) found, at least at the time the data for their study were collected, that food waste was a luxury good, with expenditure elasticities ranging from 1.10 to 1.44, and that food waste was price elastic, with demand elasticities ranging from −1.35 to −1.90.…”

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

“…Although suggesting that both our paper (Yu and Jaenicke 2020a) and Smith and Landry's paper (this issue) provide a novel methodological pathway for studying food waste, Brian Roe's comment elaborates on several important advantages (and disadvantages) of both empirical papers. Given the opportunity to reply, we would like to explore some of these topics even deeper.…”