Food waste drivers in Croatian households

Many social and economic trends encourage food wastage at household level. These trends, coupled with wrong purchasing and cooking planning, inaccurate interpretation of expiry date, inadequate storage, and lack of knowledge on how to re-use leftovers, have led to households being the largest sector in food waste generation. The objective of this paper is to investigate how households everyday practices regarding food lead to food waste. A survey was conducted with the aim to identify management behaviours with food waste among Croatian population. Nearly half (48%) of the respondents reported that the main culprit in household food wastage was preparation of excessive amounts of food for meals, while, for one third of the respondents as a reason for occurrence of food waste was the purchasing of an excessive amount of food (28.5%). Respondents were also asked to assess what activities they conduct to reduce food waste in their households. Most respondents (34.8%) stated that they feed the dog or cat. Almost a third of the respondents (27.6%) discard leftovers from meal in the bin. Most of respondents consider food waste a financial loss (68.1%), and bad for the environment (63.1%), but majority (54.3%) discarding food when suspect it is unsafe.