Frugality and food waste avoidance: Does a prime work as much as the trait?

Household food waste remains a global issue with limited success from explicit measures like food regulations and legislations. Recent studies have explored frugal priming as a means to encourage food waste avoidance. However, it is unclear whether frugal priming effects stem from immediate, automatic processing or the activation of pre-existing frugal norms. This paper investigates the effects of habitual frugality and primed frugality on food waste avoidance tendencies in individuals. Ninety-five participants were involved in an experiment using a scrambled sentence priming game. The outcome measure was food waste avoidance, examined through participants' willingness to save food items at different stages of their life cycles. Correlation and moderation analyses were used to test the hypotheses. There was an association between habitual frugality and food waste avoidance, but no main effect of frugal priming on food waste avoidance. There was an interaction effect of habitual frugality with materialistic priming such that participants with high habitual frugality, showed lower food waste propensity when exposed to materialistic primes. This study shows that implicit habitual frugality influences food waste avoidance while frugal priming does not, and when habitual frugality is low, materialistic cues increase food waste propensity in individuals. This finding implies that interventions should focus on long-term, habitual frugal habits which are more effective in reducing food waste than short-term interventions like priming. • Household food waste persists despite current regulatory measures. • Habitual frugality significantly reduces food waste. • Priming frugality does not reduce food waste. • Materialistic cues increase food waste among less frugal individuals.