Assessing Consumer Preferences for Suboptimal Food: Application of a Choice Experiment in Citrus Fruit Retail

Amid the trend of sustainable development, reducing food waste is a global concern and campaigns to reduce food waste have been launched. For example, the term “food sharing” has originated from Germany and promotes sharing food instead of wasting. “The Guerilla Kitchen”, which originated from Netherlands, is an organization that also promotes avoiding wasting food. Consequently, more and more people are paying attention on this issue and we think it is necessary to understand people’s acceptance of suboptimal food, as discarded suboptimal food represents a significant proportion of food waste. Additionally, at least one-third of the food globally produced each year is classified as suboptimal and cannot be sold in the market because of a poor appearance, damaged packaging, or near expiration date, thus presenting challenges for environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Previous studies on suboptimal food have focused more on appearances and packaging dates and less on investigating traceable agricultural and price discounts, which is where food classified as suboptimal entails a discount. Moreover, citrus product attributes such as appearance, size, freshness indicators, traceable agricultural products, and price discounts were determined in terms of consumer preference through pre-measurement here, then using a choice experiment method to clarify which attributes consumers care about most (N = 485 respondents). Conditional logistic regression and a random parameter logit model (RPL) are employed to examine the various properties of a marginal willingness to pay (WTP). RPL was also used to deduce the respondents’ choices based on differences in appearance and freshness indicator. The results showed that consumers place greater emphasis on the freshness indicators (harvesting/packaging date labels) and appearance of suboptimal citrus fruits but do not focus on the size. Consumers are willing to purchase citrus fruit with a flawed appearance, although the price needs to be reduced from the original price. Although suboptimal food does not reduce health, people may still not buy it and this result in food wastage. As a result, it is essential to increase awareness regarding suboptimal foods and reduce food waste to support sustainable development.