According to a publication by the Food and Agriculture Organisation in the past decade, if global food waste were a country, it would firmly sit in third place on the levels of emitted greenhouse gases, leaving the first two places to the United States and China. Little has changed after a decade, and global food waste has quickly become a “billion-tonne problem”. According to the UNEP programme’s 2021 Food Waste Index, the world has generated 931 million tonnes of food waste, and 569 million tonnes (61,11%) of this total amount were created by households alone. For example, an average household in the US would discard 59 kilograms of food per year, an Australian household would waste 102 kilograms, and a Russian household would generate on average 33 kilograms yearly.

As noted by one of UNEP’s studies on the topic of reducing consumer food waste using green and digital technologies, a mixed set of factors drive food waste, from knowledge to skills, attitudes, and income, and eventually leads to individual, household, and society generated waste. Numerous studies, as well as production-ready digital solutions, that were set up and built in the last decade, address the topic of food waste (refer to Chapter 2 for more details), in an attempt to better understand and potentially reduce the generated waste. From building communities with shared values to IoT devices attached to storage spaces, a series of digital concepts were implemented in pursuit of aiding with the reduction of food waste.

This study sought to understand whether a digital concept built with web technologies is a viable option when being used as a digital food inventory manager, as well as to answer whether this web concept can become a long-term tool for individuals seeking to reduce their food waste. The study attempted to highlight the challenges and the prospects that come up when attempting to add this digital concept to one’s day-to-day activities, seeking to put emphasis on the applicability of such a concept. As observed for the duration of the four-week evaluation, participants’ engagement was high in the first three weeks and started to drop by the end of the last week. As further observed and highlighted in the post-evaluation survey, a web concept has to be actively developed, new features and integrations need to be added to even an attempt to preserve user interest, and that alone should be done with an emphasis on the users’ needs. Even so, this does not guarantee that the concept will become a long-term solution. However, the short-term intervention did show potential in some aspects, where data such as the information provided by the system, the simplified list creation process, and shared lists, were praised by the participants.