Normalizing sustainable consumption: How marketing is used to fight food waste. A case study with Too Good To Go, the movement that fights food waste across Europe.

Abstract: Current consumption patterns are not sustainable and are compromising the Earth’s carrying capacity and the future of next generations. Increasing sustainable consumption behaviours and practices are needed in order to decrease nowadays negative consumption impacts on the environment and achieve sustainable development. However, sustainable consumption practices are generally not performed as they are conceived “not normal”, and changing consumers’ behaviour towards them is very difficult to address. Therefore, a social normalization process could reposition sustainable consumption practices as normal, encouraging consumers to adopt this behaviour. As part of this process, marketing is proposed as key player to normalize sustainable consumption behaviours to the mainstream, using marketing work to enhance the process among consumers. This research not only proposes the use of marketing to enable a normalization process of sustainable consumption practices, but illuminates with an ethnographic research the diverse marketing ways and mechanisms that can normalize sustainable consumption behaviours focused on the case study of Too Good To Go, the business that is enabling and normalizing the sustainable practice of avoiding waste through its marketing work and, for instance, increasing sustainable consumption among consumers and decreasing the negative environmental impacts of food waste.