Optimizing household food waste: The impact of meal planning, package sizes, and performance indicators

A key reason for the occurrence of household food waste is poor meal planning, which is partly due to inappropriate discrete package sizes at supply level and lack of accounting for unused food at consumer level. Diet modeling has proven to be effective for solving food planning problems. As far as we know, discrete package sizes have not been incorporated in a dietary meal planning model before. The mathematical programming based model formulated in this article proposes meal plans and shopping lists by selecting combinations of recipes based on available retail package sizes such that food waste, costs, GHGE, and nutritional value are optimized. It generates healthy, affordable meal plans with no waste. Moreover, not only food weight but also GHGE should be considered as performance indicator for food waste. This study shows how careful weekly meal planning can help reducing household waste and the carbon footprint of diets.