Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 183, 10 May 2018, Pages 698-709
Journal of Cleaner Production

Cosmetic specifications in the food waste issue: Supply chain considerations and practices concerning suboptimal food products

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.02.132Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A qualitative research on supply chain actors’ decisions concerning suboptimal foods.

  • We identify the presence, nature and impact of cosmetic specifications on food waste.

  • Cosmetic specifications generate suboptimal foods, which are regularly wasted.

  • The Motivation, Ability, Opportunity model is used for suboptimal food decisions.

  • This generates new and essential insights into the food waste problem.

Abstract

During the last decade, food waste has become an object of interest for both scholars and society. The existence of cosmetic specifications regarding the physical appearance of foods in the food supply chains is considered to be one of the important causes of food waste. The relevant aesthetic standards concern the product's weight, shape, and size and are thought to contribute considerably to food waste across multiple supply chain levels. It has been suggested that the abolition of these specifications could be a relatively easy way to prevent food wastage. However, there is a dearth of empirical research due to the lack of data on the extent to which foods are wasted as a result of cosmetic specifications only. Importantly, there is also a lack of insight into the decision-making process of supply chain actors regarding such suboptimal products. The present research aims to fill this gap by investigating the motivations and perceptions of supply chain actors in their strategies on how to handle suboptimal products in their business practices. From thirty-three interviews with primary producers, producer organizations, and retailers from Germany and the Netherlands, we derive initial insights into (1) the presence and nature of cosmetic specifications, (2) the impact of these specifications on food waste, (3) the motivations, abilities, and opportunities of supply chain actors to handle suboptimal products in their business practice and (4) their perspectives on the end consumers' willingness to buy and pay for suboptimal products. With the Motivation, Ability, and Opportunity (MOA) framework, we provide new understanding of supply chain actors' decisions concerning the production or wastage of suboptimal products, which can generate new and essential insights into the food waste problem.

Introduction

Of the food produced for human consumption, a surprising one-third to one-half is not consumed by humans, but instead wasted (FAO, 2013, Parfitt et al., 2010). Food waste can be defined as “any food, and inedible parts of food, removed from the food supply chain to be recovered or disposed (including composted, crops ploughed in/not harvested, anaerobic digestion, bio-energy production, co-generation, incineration, disposal to sewer, landfill or discarded to sea)” (FUSIONS, 2014, p. 6). 1 Wasting food is inefficient in economic, environmental, social, and moral respects. For example, the food production is estimated to cause approximately a third of all greenhouse gas emissions (Garnett, 2011), requiring extensive use of water, energy, land, and other natural resources (FAO, 2013, Godfray et al., 2010). Wasting food is also problematic from a food security perspective, i.e., the challenge of feeding a growing population, and from a moral perspective, i.e., the value of food (Garnett, 2011). Food waste occurs along the entire food supply chain, including consumer households (Buzby et al., 2011, Garrone et al., 2014, Griffin et al., 2009, Parfitt et al., 2010). This suggests that successful strategies to reduce food waste should focus on multiple levels of, and actors within the food supply chain (Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2015).

According to several scholars (e.g., Beretta et al., 2013, Buzby et al., 2011, Gobel et al., 2015, Gustavsson and Stage, 2011, Lebersorger and Schneider, 2014), one important and easily preventable source of food waste at multiple levels in the supply chain are the product standards or cosmetic specifications for food products, particularly for fruits and vegetables. Cosmetic specifications govern rules concerning the product's appearance, weight, shape, and size but not its intrinsic quality or safety (Gobel et al., 2015, Halloran et al., 2014). Products that do not meet such cosmetic specifications, which are also called oddly-shaped foods (Loebnitz et al., 2015), foods with aesthetical imperfections (Beretta et al., 2013), or a subcategory of suboptimal foods (Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2015, De Hooge et al., 2017), have difficulties moving through the food supply chain and reaching the end customer (or consumer) (Gobel et al., 2015). 2 Many suboptimal products are thought to be ploughed back into the ground, developed into cattle feed, fertilizer, or biogas, or simply wasted (Beretta et al., 2013). The existence of such suboptimal products is not only problematic from the perspective of preventing food waste; they may also have impact on the business practices of primary producers, producer organizations, and retailers.

Many researchers have quantified food waste at various stages of the food supply chain and have indicated that cosmetic specifications is a potential cause of food waste (e.g., Beretta et al., 2013, Buzby et al., 2011, Gobel et al., 2015, Gustavsson and Stage, 2011, Lebersorger and Schneider, 2014). However, thus far no research has specifically provided insights into the impact of cosmetic specifications on food waste. Knowledge about this phenomenon is inherently difficult to obtain because suboptimal products are hardly recorded in production statistics. Even more important for this phenomenon is the understanding of supply chain actors’ motivations, abilities, and opportunities to prevent wasting of suboptimal products and to include them into their production systems. However, there are currently no studies on this subject.

The purpose of the present study is to fill this knowledge gap in the literature by identifying the impact of cosmetic standards on supply chain actors’ business practices. In thirty-three in-depth semi-structured interviews with German (N = 14) and Dutch (N = 19) primary producers, producer organizations, and retailers3 we aim to identify (1) the presence and nature of cosmetic specifications and (2) their impact on food waste, (3) the motivations, abilities, and opportunities of supply chain actors in handling suboptimal products in their business practices, and (4) their perspectives on the willingness of consumers to buy suboptimal products. To develop our behavioural model concerning on how supply chain actors handle suboptimal products, we build on the Motivation, Ability, and Opportunity (MOA) framework (MacInnis et al., 1991, Ölander and Thøgersen, 1995).

Product specifications are an important tool in supply chains for managing the quality levels of products offered to (end)customers. Within Europe, product specifications for fruits and vegetables have been formalised in European and national legislations. These specifications focus on the minimally required levels of quality, maturity (ripeness), safety, smell, taste, origin of produce, packaging, uniformity across products within one package, shape, skin, size, and weight. Quality-grade classifications are derived from these minimal levels (European Union, 2007, European Union, 2011). Such specifications are implemented as part of the marketing standards throughout all European food supply chains, and govern not only European produced foods but also fruits and vegetables imported from countries outside of the European Union. Products that do not fulfil the European product specifications are either not allowed into the European market or withdrawn (if they were already in the market when product aspects changed).

One part of the European product specifications concerns the cosmetic aspects or appearance of fruits and vegetables. These cosmetic specifications are the basis for the quality grading of fruits and vegetables into specified quality standards such as Extra, A-class, or B-class. Originally, the cosmetic specifications focused on the colour, shape, skin, size, and weight of all fruits and vegetables (European Union, 2007). In 2009, the cosmetic specifications were removed for 26 of the 36 product types (European Union, 2008). However, nowadays these specifications still exist for ten of the most popular fruits and vegetables in the European Union: apples, citrus fruit, kiwifruit, lettuces, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, table grapes and tomatoes (European Union, 2011). Several studies have indicated that these specifications contribute substantially to food waste (Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2015, Halloran et al., 2014). The main argument in this debate is that due to the cosmetic specifications, food products that meet all quality and safety specifications would be wasted just because their shape, size, weight, or colour “is different from usual aesthetic standards” (Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2015, De Hooge et al., 2017, Schneider and Lebersorger, 2011). Instead of wasting these products, their consumption could be a relatively easy way to provide safe and high quality foods for a large number of consumers.

It is not only the European Union that may set cosmetic specifications for fruits and vegetables; supply chain actors may also have a variety of reasons to set their own (Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2015, Gobel et al., 2015, Stuart, 2009). Together with setting supply chain standards for production, cosmetic specifications may also help avoid negative quality inferences that consumers could make about suboptimal products and consequently, about the actors that are selling these products (Stuart, 2009). If supply chain actors presume that customers and consumers will negatively evaluate suboptimal products, then actors may hold on to impression management concerns when deliberating whether to abolish cosmetic specifications. Also, cosmetic specifications regarding, for example, the shape and size of products may increase the efficiency of packaging and transport logistics (Raak et al., 2017). Hence, abolishing such specifications may lead to concerns related to logistics. Finally, cosmetic specifications may avoid competition among the actors' own products: i.e., those that fulfil the cosmetic specifications versus those that do not. Especially when suboptimal products are sold on the same retailer shelf as the “perfect” alternatives but with a price reduction (as is currently the case for some retailers, see Aschemann-Witzel et al., 2017), suboptimal products can form a direct competition for the actors’ own perfect alternatives. Such strategy may ultimately undermine the price levels for perfect products. Offering perfect and suboptimal products at the same price, in direct competition with each other, may reduce choice likelihood for suboptimal products.

It has been suggested that the 2009 abolition of the European Union's cosmetic specifications for most of the fruits and vegetables did not lead to food waste reduction across supply chains (Loebnitz et al., 2015). This may be because of the existence of supply chain actors' own cosmetic specifications, but it is also possible that cosmetic specifications do not generate food waste. Although several research (e.g., Beretta et al., 2013, Buzby et al., 2011, Gobel et al., 2015, Gustavsson and Stage, 2011, Lebersorger and Schneider, 2014) have suggested that cosmetic specifications are a major source of food waste across supply chain actors, there is currently no empirical data that demonstrates that products that do not fulfil these cosmetic specifications are wasted. It is therefore possible that actors find alternative ways to manage and deal with suboptimal product streams. For example, they may donate suboptimal products to food banks, move them to private customer sales, or export them to non-European Union countries. Indeed, it could be argued that from an actor's point of view it would be economically irrational to waste products. In light of these discussions, we aimed for two things with our interviews: to provide insights into the existence and nature of cosmetic specifications, and to highlight the impact that these specifications have on the business practices of supply chain actors regarding products that do not conform to the specifications.

Supply chains are designed and optimised for the jointly effective and efficient delivery of value to consumers in the form of products and services (Kozlenkova et al., 2015). To achieve this, supply chains focus on consumer needs and on mutually profitable alignment among the involved actors (Feng et al., 2013). In other words, supply chains are focused on creating maximum value with minimum costs as an approach to utility maximisation. They do so with standardised production and marketing of products that conform to the (highest) quality specifications (Tan et al., 1998). Suboptimal products pose a complex problem for utility maximisation-focused supply chains: these products are deviations from mainstream operations and thus do not fit the standardisation process. When one takes into account that the production and marketing of suboptimal products are likely to be a source of impression management concerns, logistical complexities, pricing complexities, and competition complexities, then it seems very challenging to avoid costs of wasted resources without incurring too many additional costs and to manage the latter within the boundary conditions of the mainstream business model.

Consequently, the production and marketing of suboptimal products may not appear economically rational under current market conditions. However at the same time, wasting suboptimal products also seems to be an economically and morally irrational or inappropriate behaviour. Therefore, to analyse the decision process of supply chain actors concerning suboptimal products, we used the Motivation, Ability, and Opportunity (MOA) framework (MacInnis et al., 1991, Ölander and Thøgersen, 1995). The MOA framework states that the translation of weak(er) motivations into behavioural intentions and actual behaviour is dependent on relevant knowledge and skills and on the opportunities provided by the perceived facilitators and barriers present in the environment in which the behaviour is to occur. 4 The MOA framework is well-established in marketing and management research areas as information processing (MacInnis et al., 1991), performance measurement (Clark et al., 2005), knowledge sharing (Siemsen et al., 2008), environmentally friendly behaviour (Ölander and Thøgersen, 1995), and more general social marketing (Rothschild, 1999). The framework aims to predict individual behaviour in a social context on the basis of the individual's motivation and ability and the perceived opportunities in the social environment (MacInnis et al., 1991). Applied to the current context, ‘motivation’ stands for the supply chain actors' motivation to bring suboptimal products to the market, ’ability’ captures the actors' knowledge (“know what”), skills, and competencies (“know how”) related to the production and marketing of suboptimal products, and ‘opportunity’ represents the environmental or contextual facilitators and barriers that enable or hinder the production and marketing of suboptimal products. With the MOA framework, we identified the motivations, abilities and opportunities of supply chain actors in handling suboptimal products in their business practices. This is the third aim of our interviews.

Finally, because supply chains are ultimately focused on delivering value to consumers (Kozlenkova et al., 2015), the decisions of actors concerning cosmetic specifications and the marketing of suboptimal products will likely also depend on how much they think consumers are willing to purchase imperfect products. Thus, our fourth aim is to identify the actors' perspectives on consumers’ willingness to buy suboptimal products.

Section snippets

Research approach

Given the lack of prior research on cosmetic specifications, the current study adopted a qualitative approach. This approach is particularly appropriate for providing preliminary in-depth information (Gubrium and Holstein, 2002) in the (underlying) motivations and perceptions of supply chain actors concerning the production and marketing of suboptimal fruits and vegetables. We collected the data using semi-structured interviews with producers, producer organizations, and retailers.

Respondent selection

Presence and nature of cosmetic specifications

The findings from the interviews supported our assumption that cosmetic specifications are not only set by the European Union but that they are also self-imposed by the food supply chain. At all three supply chain levels (producers, producer organizations, and retailers) both in Germany and the Netherlands, all interviewed parties indicated that cosmetic specifications were being used in their industry. They all admitted that next to the EU regulation, retailer requirements constituted a main

Theoretical implications

Even though many researchers have pointed to the existence of cosmetic specifications as one potential cause of food wastage, to the best of our knowledge the current research is the first empirical study that focuses on the food waste implications of cosmetic specifications and on supply chain actors' decision-making process regarding the production, marketing, or wasting of products that do not meet such cosmetic specifications. Interviews with 33 producers, producer organizations, and

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    This research was conducted as part of the ERA-NET SUSFOOD project “COSUS”. With special thanks to Carlotta von Rosenberg for help with the data collection.

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