Food for All
Food Waste from the Restaurant Employees’ Perspective
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tsu-Hong Yen, Yinghua Huang, Pi Shin Wey
Food waste refers to “food appropriate for human consumption being discarded, whether or not after it is kept beyond its expiry date or left to spoil” (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2013). Previous research on food waste primarily focused on the production chain, industry comparison, consumers’ perceptions of food waste, and strategies to reduce food waste, etc. However, relatively less research examined food waste issues from the restaurant employees’ perspective. The restaurant industry is one of the largest employers in the United States. The National Restaurant Association estimated the restaurant industry hired more than 14.7 million employees in 2017. Nearly half of all adults have worked in the restaurant industry at least once during their life, and over one-third of adults worked their first job in a restaurant. Given the enormous number of people who have worked at a restaurant in their life, their view of food waste should be explored. This study attempts to narrow this gap in literature by investigating how restaurant employees perceive issues related to food waste. A qualitative research approach was employed in order to develop a deeper understanding of restaurant employees’ perception of food waste. An online focus group method was adopted. Participants were college students who have restaurant work experience. The preliminary findings indicated that the management issues causing food waste include ineffective inventory and forecast methods, inconsistent food quality, chef’s personal philosophy toward food, entering incorrect order information by the staff, etc. More insights of the results are discussed in the forthcoming paper.
Combating Availability Bias for a Local Food Bank Using Visual Analytics
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Steven Jiang
Food banks play an important role in the fight against hunger. Food bank managers often need to make difficult decisions due to the uncertainty in the supply and demand. Studies have shown that cognitive biases have an impact on decision making. This study investigates availability bias, one of the cognitive biases food bank operational managers face. Specifically, we wanted to use visual analytics, a tool that combines visualization and analytics to combat the availability bias. Using operational data from a local food bank, interactive dashboards were prepared as an alternative to the customary spreadsheet format that the food bank currently uses. A preliminary study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the dashboard and results indicated dashboards reduced the impact of the availability bias. Ten participants were recruited to the study. A between subject design was used with the independent variable being the presentation mode (traditional spreadsheet vs. interactive dashboard). The task was to forecast the amount of donated or distributed food for a certain week in the future based on historical data. Non parametric analyses were conducted to compare the performance and results indicated that the dashboard group performed significantly better than the spreadsheet group (S=730, p<0.05) although no significant difference was found in confidence ratings between the two presentation modes (S=19.5, p=0.067).
