Food shape abnormality is just one criterion for separating foods; additional studies should examine whether other criteria that retailers use to meet consumer demands for cosmetically perfect food, such as color, size, or texture, influence buying intentions
too. Furthermore, as food retailing continues to shift from fragmented, local markets to larger, centralized supermarkets in China, consumers might not realize how much food gets wasted to match their expectations of cosmetically spotless food. Descriptive results show that 26.4% of participants either strongly agreed or agreed with the statement ‘‘fruits and vegetables that are 30% larger or smaller than average may not to be sold in Chinese supermarket’’,
while 31.1% indicated that they strongly disagreed or disagreed with it. Concerning the statement ‘‘fruits and vegetables that have an abnormal shape may not be sold in Chinese supermarkets’’, 44.3% of Chinese participants are opposed to sorting abnormal shaped food out while 28.8% are in favor. These descriptive results support Chan and Lau’s (2002) findings who attribute Chinese lack of environmental knowledge to the less pronounced sustainable
consumption pattern across the country and call for strengthening China’s environmental education to affront sustainability issues. However, it also strengthens Hongyan’s
(2003) findings that one can witness an increase in Chinese environmental concern, in that purchasing abnormally shaped food constitutes an environmental friendly behavior by reducing food waste. Future studies may access Chinese problem awareness of food waste and how this impacts consumer’s purchase intentions. Although environmental concerns are on the rise, governments and companies alike should educate consumers and raise awareness of how food waste threatens environmental sustainability. The resulting potential increase in environmental concerns might enhance purchase intentions toward abnormally shaped food.
A limitation of the present study was that we used unpriced purchase intention score which may be a poor indicator of actual purchase behavior. Therefore, future studies should investigate
consumers’ trade-offs between food shape abnormalities and price. Furthermore, participants indicated that they shop at well-known stores and large malls. We only had a small proportion of participants that shopped at farmer markets where the pre-selection of abnormal food may not take place. Therefore, the results are preliminary and should not be generalized to whole China. Moreover, the study reported here involved only Chinese consumers which tend to have higher trust in institutions promoting and regulating food production than consumers in other countries . Therefore, this study should be replicated in other countries as the results might be somewhat different in other countries. Finally, we call for replications of this study in the future, to investigate whether environmental concerns continue to prevail and grow among Chinese consumers and whether such increases are sufficient to encourage Chinese consumers to adopt environmentally friendly behaviors, including reductions of food waste.