Increasing Customer Awareness on Food Waste at University Cafeteria with a Sensor-Based Intelligent Self-Serve Lunch Line

Lunch cafeterias are forced to throw away food daily. The two main reasons are customer food waste and cafeteria food overproduction. Currently lunch cafeterias are able to follow how much surplus food is generated and find solutions such as offering excess food to consumers at a discount the next day. Reducing consumer food waste is more challenging. Previous work suggests, that quantifying and displaying the data on how much food consumers waste, can lead to a behavior change towards eating habits which result in a decreased quantity of wasted food. Following this conjecture, an intelligent self-serve lunch line was implemented at a university cafeteria. The lunch line was designed to contain sensors tracking food waste of individual customers and to display this data to customers via a dedicated mobile app. Following the Hevner design science method, this study reports the design and implementation of this lunch line as well as shows via preliminary data from real customers, 700–1000 daily customers during January 2020, of how much bio-waste is created in the cafeteria. During this time period, on average 3% of food taken by customers ended up wasted.