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Introduction
The global foodservice sector encompasses numerous organizations providing food for consumption away from home. These organizations are represented by commercial enterprises operating for profit but also by contracted enterprises offering food to certain categories of consumers at a subsidized price (Edwards, 2020). Growing popularity of food consumption outside the home prior to the COVID-19 pandemic has determined the large contribution of foodservices to the global societal challenge of food waste (FW). The United Nations Environment Programme-UNEP (2021) quantifies this contribution as 244 Mt per year, equating to over 20% of the total FW generated worldwide. Therefore, the need to prevent and mitigate FW in the global foodservice sector has been repeatedly recognized (Dhir et al., 2020; Filimonau and De Coteau, 2019; Papargyropoulou et al., 2016).
Empirical evidence suggests that a wide range of processes and activities can drive FW generation in the foodservice sector. In-house operations (Okumus et al., 2020), customer-related factors (Yetkin Özbük and Coşkun, 2020) and business models (Heikkilä et al., 2016) exert the largest effect. For instance, issues with designing (Sharma et al., 2021), planning (Derqui and Fernandez, 2017), purchasing (Filimonau and Gherbin, 2017), storing (Charlebois et al., 2015), preserving (Leverenz et al., 2021), preparing (Sakaguchi et al., 2018), cooking (Aamir et al., 2018), serving (Chang, 2021) and consuming (Wang et al., 2021) food can lead to FW occurrence.
Dhir et al. (2020) pinpoint diners (customers), staff and managers as FW stakeholders in the foodservice sector and highlight the importance of their engagement in FW prevention and mitigation. In fact, scholars distinguish between pre-consumer or kitchen FW, i.e. the food wasted before it is served to customers and post-kitchen or plate waste, i.e. the food left uneaten by diners (Derqui et al., 2016). Diners can leave food uneaten if its appearance and taste do not meet their expectations (Heikkilä et al., 2016). Food can be wasted in the kitchen because front-of-house employees do not always appreciate the challenge of FW (Kasavan et al., 2019), while back-of-house staff can lack skills in resourceful cooking (Charlebois et al., 2015). To engage diners and staff in FW prevention and mitigation, it is necessary to explain the importance of their engagement...