Date Labels, Food Waste, and Implications along the Supply Chain

Bradley Rickard, Cornell University

We developed a survey to collect information on consumers’ intentions to discard 15 food products when exposed to different date labels including biosensors. Results show that the use of certain date labels has the capacity to reduce food waste, but the reductions would happen differentially across food groups and, in some cases, would lead to a relative decrease in household purchases of carbohydrates, sugar and lead to an increase in the relative purchases of fats, cholesterol, and protein.