EU Food Loss and Waste Prevention Hub

The goal for this nudging experiment was to test interventions in a small sample (a nudge group and a control group) of households that represent a broadly composed target group from all over Norway. The objective was to learn whether it is possible to get people to actually change their behaviour and over a period of eight weeks manage to reduce their food waste. The participants chose three different food categories they wanted to stop wasting and made a plan for how to achieve this.

Promising results:

• 6 out of 10 households did not waste their chosen food categories
• 3 out of 4 wasted less of other food categories
• Reduced likelihood of throwing away food
• Increased use of strategies to not throw away food
• Increased self-efficacy and use of plans
• Higher level of awareness of own food waste
• Positive change in attitudes
• Increased awareness around barriers that make it difficult to reduce food waste

These results show that nudging is an effective method of creating increased awareness of your own food waste and achieving actual behavioural change. We have prepared some recommendations for how this can be taken further and hopefully result in a national strategy with associated intervention programs and platforms with concrete tools. You can read more about these recommendations in the attached report, but in brief summary they are as follows:

• Establishing of a national intervention programme
• Collaborating with the local government sector
• Using existing digital platforms
• Using specific short-term goals
• Implementing awareness campaign(s)