Expiration Date Perception and Food Disposal Decision

Abstract

Despite the important role that expiration dates play in shaping consumers’ food disposal decisions, information about foods’ expiration dates is often absent or ambiguous. We study how consumers infer expiration dates and how such inferences influence subsequent disposal decisions. We propose that consumers use the perceived healthiness of a food as a cue to infer its expiration date, thereby forming an intuition that healthy food expires quickly. Hence, a mere framing of a food item as healthy increases the perception that it expires quickly and decision to discard.