Potato food waste in Swiss households – quantity, driving factors and waste behavior of consumers

This study quantifies the amount of potatoes being lost in Swiss households and examines drivers and causes of these losses. Therefore, three types of losses occurring in private households have been investigated: (1) potatoes which have been disposed without being prepared, (2) peeling and preparation losses and (3) leftovers. With the aid of a questionnaire sent to 2000 randomly chosen Swiss households and a voluntary 30-days-diary study, the influence of socio-demographic factors, as well as factors focusing on consumers preferences and behaviors have been analyzed. Descriptive statistics have been used to examine first trends, a factor analysis was conducted to reduce the amount of variables representing consumers’ preferences to underlying factors and Generalized Linear Models (GLM) have been assembled to estimate the influence of several predictors on the three types of losses. Our results show that socio-demographic factors have a significant impact on potato losses in private households. In particular the age is a strong predictor for all three losses. Household