Fighting Food Waste with Food Sharing Platforms? A quantitative analysis of consumers’ repurchase intention on profit food sharing platforms

Abstract: Food waste could cause problems in society, the economy, and the environment, which is regarded as a global problem. In advanced countries, the majority of food waste happens in the retailer-consumer interface. Commercial digital food sharing platforms (CDFSPs) as a part of sharing economy could help save food from ending up in the bins in the business-to-consumer (B2C) context. This thesis focused on consumer repurchase intention, which is vital to the success of CDFSPs and transfer consumer food consumption to a more sustainable pattern. There is a lack of research on consumer repurchase intention in CDFSPs context. Against this background, this thesis conducted a quantitative approach to investigate the factors that could influence consumers’ repurchase intention in profit food sharing apps. The study extended the technology acceptance model (TAM) and analyzed seven factors that could potentially influence repurchase intention. The non-probability sampling methods were adopted to distribute an online survey to collect data from March 20 to April 8, 2022. Finally, 218 valid respondents were collected. The data analysis findings expanded previous research on sharing economy platforms in the field of CDFSPs. An independent-samples t-test method was used to investigate the different performances of consumers in terms of demographical characteristics, and the results showed that the CDFSPs consumers were not a homogeneous group. Then, the author utilized the stepwise regression analysis to test the hypothesis, suggesting that perceived risk can significantly negatively influence consumer repurchase intention. Significant positive relationships have been observed between environmental consideration, social influence, perceived ease of use, economic value, and perceived usefulness and repurchase intention. Furthermore, the factor trust did not significantly influence repurchase intention on CDFSPs. The author further provided recommendations to the CDFSPs practitioners to help them better develop the platforms.