Evaluation of food waste reduction in German private households— Development of an app approach

A declared goal of the German Federal Government is to halve per capita food waste in Germany at the retail and consumer level by 2030. Many initiatives have been working for some time on contributing to this goal by, e.g., educating households about food waste and providing them with help to reduce food waste. The effectiveness of these efforts has hardly been systematically investigated to date. The German Federal Government has therefore implemented the "Dialogforum private Haushalte 2.0" project.

Within this project, the development of an app is being driven forward. This app is meant to enable the systematic measurement and evaluation of food waste generated in private households. The app is currently under development. With its measurement function tool, it provides a basis for private households to track food waste and receive information and incentives to further reduce food waste. Supplementary mechanisms facilitate the evaluation of different means to reduce household food waste, e.g., (i) live-generated statistics can be used to compare food waste quantities with socio-demographically similar households in Germany; (ii) practical tips could be provided, for example, on the shelf life of food and reasons for throwing it away (behavior-based threshold values); and (iii) gamification elements such as awards or badges offer incentives to positively change individual behavior. Beyond this, it is possible to evaluate various actions (also externally organized and/or corporate) with the aim of reducing food waste in private households, including automated data reports for data analysis by the action organizers. As part of the conference, possible pitfalls and hurdles to implementation are discussed.