Exploring Food Waste in Private Households in Skåne

Abstract: In 2020, 200 million children under the age of 5 were reported to be malnourished and between 720 and 811 million people around the world faced hunger. Yet, the global food production have the potential to feed every human being twice the amount required. So what is happening with all that food? 1.3 billion tonnes of the global food supply is wasted every year, which accounts for one third of the food produced. In Sweden, private households stand for 70% of the total waste. Food waste has been a problem for some time now. So, the goal with this study is to investigate reasons that contribute to this high food waste and suggest a solution or guidelines to prevent/reduce that in private households in the Skåne county. To explore the topic, academic literature were reviewed and Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with the target group for this study, i.e., families living in Skåne county with children living at home and both parents working. Additionally, 103 responses were gathered through an online questionnaire from the same target group.  The findings revealed that families struggled with planning properly before they entered a grocery store, which meant that they ended up buying much more than they needed. Moreover, it was revealed that people had the tendency to get sidetracked during shopping. These practices, in most instances, resulted in double and over buying, and impulsive shopping, which meant that more food was going to waste without ever being consumed in their respective households.  With these findings in mind, we have hypothesized that online shopping has the potential to prevent food waste in private households, as well as created a design on how to get more people feeling comfortable doing grocery shopping online based on a human centred design approach.  To conclude this thesis, we define the contributing factors of household food waste and argue that food waste can be reduced by a significant amount if people are shopping online and are adhering to some sort of food budget to control their spendings.