Is this food or litter? : explicit and implicit attitudes to sub-optimal foods in evoked purchase and consumption contexts

One of the major global societal and environmental issues today is consumer food waste. While attitudes against food waste may be strong, internal intuitive mechanisms may lead consumers to prefer fresher and neater products to less appealing ones. The main objective of this thesis is threefold. First, to compare consumers’ implicit and explicit attitudes towards optimal and suboptimal foods. Second, to investigate the complementarity of implicit and explicit methods when predicting consumer behavior from high-cognitive and lowcognitive measures. Finally, to find out if context has an effect on consumers’ explicit perception of suboptimal foods. Suboptimal fruits and vegetables (bruised, misshaped) and packaged products (dented packaging, broken product) were used as a case