Business Incentive to Reduce Food Losses in Japan

Although market-based or new business solutions such as food sharing services are important to reduce food wastage, a limited amount of people use sharing economy services, such that real restaurant services are scarce in countries such as Japan. Moreover, while the perspectives of consumer and food wasting behavior in restaurants, doggy bags, and new sharing business applications are important, existing studies related to food loss have not focused on these issues all together in an analytic model. Therefore, this study proposes a new business incentive model to reduce food loss, and we further analyze the feasibility and potential of our proposal by extending the existing basic analytic model. The proposed service is to provide coupons or points in digital applications if customers finish their meal at a restaurant without wasting food; these coupons/points can be used to avail discounts on their future meals. We considered three models of intention to use incentives to reduce food loss and compared new business proposals with the other two incentive services. The results showed that the proposed services are less likely to be used by people who are interested in but do not experience using food sharing services. Nevertheless, the proposed new service has the potential to be used by younger people and people with household incomes ranging from 5 to 10 million yen, indicating that such services have the potential to create a new target group for food loss implementation and a business that encourages a strategy to reduce food loss.