The Hidden Costs of Shifting Away from Flexible Packaging: Implications for Food Prices, Access, and Food Waste Among Low-Income U.S. Households

Packaging plays an important role not only in protecting food and extending shelf life but also in shaping affordability, portability, storage, and the risk of spoilage at the household level. This study examines how flexible plastic and alternative packaging formats differ in retail price and how low-income U.S. households report they would respond to packaging-related changes that could affect food access and food waste. Two complementary approaches were used. First, an online and in-store retail audit compared 57 matched food products sold in flexible plastic and alternative packaging formats. Alternative format products were more expensive on average when prices were normalized by product weight, although the magnitude of the difference varied substantially across products. Second, a survey of 473 U.S. adults with annual household incomes below USD 40,000 examined responses to hypothetical changes in food price, carrying difficulty, storage fit, and spoilage. Ordered logit models showed that food-insecure households reported greater sensitivity to price increases, households facing transportation burdens reported greater difficulty with harder-to-carry packaging, and households with storage constraints reported greater difficulty with packaging that was harder to store. Shopping frequency was the strongest predictor of responses to faster spoilage. Together, the findings indicate that changes in packaging format may create different challenges across households depending on their financial, transportation, storage, and shopping constraints. Because the survey captures reported responses to hypothetical scenarios rather than observed purchasing or food waste behavior, the findings should be interpreted as evidence of household vulnerability to packaging-related changes rather than direct causal effects of packaging transitions or policy.