Attaching a sad message to lone bananas left on the supermarket shelf appeared to help increase purchases of such fruit.
The indulgence of the holiday season puts the question of food waste back on the table.
From labels showing the ripeness of fruit and vegetables, mangas on milk bottles to encourage consumers to drink up, or lower prices as the use-by date approaches, there’s no shortage of initiatives to encourage consumers to reduce food waste.
Between harvest and retail, an estimated 13.2% of the world’s food goes to waste.
Could playing on consumers’ feelings be another way of helping to drive this number down?
In other words, making them feel uncomfortable about seeing a fruit or vegetable left to rot in the supermarket bin.
This was the hypothesis of a study published in the journal Psychology and Marketing, and carried out in the German supermarket chain REWE, using solitary bananas as the experiment’s main guinea pigs.
These lone fruits are typically left at the store after shoppers detach the number of bananas they need from a bunch.
As part of the experiment, the scientists put up a sign featuring a banana with a sad face, and with the message “We are sad singles and want to be bought as well”.
The idea was to stir feelings of empathy among consumers.
But can consumers really feel emotion towards food products?
Seemingly so, since the number of single bananas sold per hour increased from 2.02 (when an emotionless banana sign was displayed) to 3.19 (with the “sad” banana sign), amounting to an increase of 58%.
“Sales of ‘single’ bananas significantly increased when they were anthropomorphised with sad emotions, compared to when they were anthropomorphised with happy emotions or not anthropomorphised,” the study reads.
Similar results were seen when the experiment was carried out with tomatoes.
But a final analysis tested whether price cuts could be more or less effective than anthropomorphism in getting consumers to buy these leftover fruits.
And it turns out that price cuts were more effective than sad faces in driving consumers to choose single bananas.
In conclusion, this research suggests that retailers could try personifying lone, ugly or imperfect foodstuffs first, before opting for lower prices to prevent these items from going to waste. – AFP Relaxnews
