Page 10 - Faculty Research Publication Booklet_Apr 2022_Mar 2023_Final

Shankar, A., Dhir, A., Talwar, S., Islam, N., & Sharma, P.

(2022). Balancing food waste and sustainability goals in

online food delivery: Towards a comprehensive conceptual

framework. Technovation, 117, 102606.

Increasing food waste is a major threat to sustainability and food security. Recognizing the issue, the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 mandates reducing global food waste by 50 percent by 2030. This situation

has also given impetus to academic research on consumer food waste in both household and out-of-home settings.
However, food delivery apps (FDAs) remain under-researched from this perspective. This is a serious gap because
operating under a business model that inherently facilitates food over-ordering, FDAs can be a major source of food
waste. Understanding the demand-side factors that drive consumers to order more food than required to satiate

their hunger can be useful in mitigating such wasteful indulgences. Noting this, we extend the seminal theory of
planned behavior (TPB) to propose direct and intervening mechanisms that can better explicate why consumers
indulge in a ‘shopping routine’ of ordering more food than required. We analyzed data from 487 FDA users to test
the proposed hypotheses. Our results reveal the positive associations of (a) attitude and subjective norms with

usage intentions and (b) trust, intentions, and leftover reuse routine with shopping routine. In addition, both proposed
moderators—i.e., willingness to pay for eco-friendly packaging and number of years of FDA usage—do, in fact,
moderate the associations of leftover reuse routine with both usage intentions and shopping routine. These findings
can help marketers and policymakers devise appropriate strategies to promote pro-environmental green behaviors

among FDA users without harming the commercial interests of the sector.

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