Empty shelves, or bread waste? How the freshness-availability logic sustains bread waste in the bakery-retail system

Sammendrag

Bread is one of the most wasted food categories globally. This study takes a new approach to understanding bread waste in in the Norwegian bakery-retail system by uncovering how a field-level logic sustains bread waste, despite economic or technological advances.
Using a mixed-methods design, the study combines 23 semi-structured interviews with industry representatives and experts with annual bread and bakery waste data from 2015 to 2024. Drawing on Institutional Logics Perspective (ILP), the study identifies a freshness–availability logic. This institutionalized logic, reflected in norms, values, and beliefs around day-fresh bread and full assortment availability throughout opening hours, shapes organizational practices and sustains bread waste. The logic is reinforced by costly stockouts for a strategic product like bread.
Although it cannot prove causal effect, coupling interview findings with waste data shows stable waste levels from 2015 to 2021 when two of three retailers softened their Take-Back-Agreements (TBAs), and all retailers implemented forecasting models. This suggests that changing TBAs may not necessarily reduce waste within the context of Norway’s bakery-retail system because they primarily shift costs in a vertically integrated value-chain, while forecasting models optimize rather than eliminate waste. Neither measure changes the field-level logic.
Instead, waste reductions coincide with the systematic markdown of day-old bread implemented in 2022-2023, when waste levels declined by 42 %. We argue that this is because markdowns loosen the dominant logic by extending the narrow selling window. The paper extends existing research by showing how consumer expectations, organizational practices, and performance priorities become interconnected in ways that sustain bread surplus. The findings highlight the need to disrupt the freshness-availability logic to accelerate bread waste reduction.

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DOI : doi.org/10.1016/j.clfs.2026.10...
NVA : hdl.handle.net/11250/5596125