Short-term gains, long-term losses: exploring food waste practices of chefs in professional kitchens of casual dining restaurants through the lens of time discounting and habit formation

Abstract

Food waste in professional kitchens is a significant challenge, but the cognitive and behavioural drivers of chefs' food waste practices remain under-explored. Drawing on the concept of time discounting and habit theory, this study investigates how chefs navigate immediate operational priorities of busy kitchens and how routinised food waste behaviour is formed and maintained. Semi-structured interviews with chefs in Thailand (n = 20) identify a pattern of short-term incentives i.e., speed, aesthetics, and perceived guest satisfaction, reinforcing food waste habits among chefs. Findings reveal that conventional, temporally distant interventions designed to encourage resourceful behaviour, such as monthly food cost reports, fail to disrupt habitual, present-biased wasteful behaviour. Theoretically, the study offers a novel conceptual framework for understanding food waste generation by chefs as a habit loop reinforced by time-discounted decision-making. Practically, it advocates for ‘present-focussed’ interventions, such as real-time feedback on leftover repurposing, to facilitate food waste reduction in professional kitchens.