How to improve the consistency of consumers’ food waste reduction intentions and behaviors? An analysis based on the expanded Motivation–Opportunity–Ability framework

The increasingly serious problem of food waste in China has become an important bottleneck constraining sustainable development, posing a great challenge to food security, resource and the environment. Therefore, it is urgent to reduce food waste. However, the inconsistency between consumers’ intention to reduce food waste and their behavior weakens the effectiveness of anti-food waste efforts to some extent. Based on the extended MOA model, this study examines consumers’ intention-behavior gap in reducing food waste and explores the moderating effects of opportunity, ability and face consciousness on the conversion of food waste reduction intention into actual behavior in the context of China. In addition, we further categorize consumers into high and low face consciousness groups to explore the differences in the moderating effects of opportunity and ability. The results show that there is indeed a gap between consumers’ food waste reduction intention and behavior. In terms of the moderating effects, the factors of external environment, emotional information, and ability have a significant positive moderating effect on the conversion of food waste reduction intention into actual behavior, while rational information has no significant moderating effect. Notably, face consciousness plays a significant negative moderating effect. For the high face consciousness group, only emotional information has a significant positive moderating effect; while for the low face consciousness group, external environment, emotional information, and ability have a significant positive moderating effect. What’s more, rational information has a non-significant moderating effect on both the high and low face consciousness groups.