Closing the Knowledge Gap: Understanding and Reducing the Environmental impact of Food Choices

Abstract

The global food system has a large impact on the environment. By converting household grocery purchases into environmental cost factors like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land use, this study examines the sustainability of food purchases over a ten-year period using household panel data in two prosustainability markets (Germany and the Netherlands). The environmental intensity of households’ grocery baskets has not declined over time in these countries. Even though younger and more educated households are starting to shift their diets, the share of plant-based alternatives in food diets remains very low. The authors propose that one contributing factor is a lack of environmental knowledge, which they address by developing an app that gives personalized feedback on the emissions associated with consumers’ food purchases. The app also allows users to create sustainable grocery bundles aligned with their dietary preferences. Two experiments demonstrate that interacting with the app (1) raises subjective and objective environmental knowledge related to food, with much of this improvement persisting for over six months, and (2) reduces GHG emissions associated with stated food choices by up to 33%. These reductions are driven by different information formats within the app, including peer comparisons and detailed information about food-category emissions.