Undergraduate research at the University of Adelaide is proving invaluable to the Fight Food Waste Cooperative Research Centre’s research into consumer perceptions, program leader Dr Dianne McGrath says.
The three international students joined forces and spent six weeks of their summer break on Summer Research Scholarships from the university’s Faculty of Sciences.
Thai Phuong Anh (Alicia) Nguyen (Vietnam), Xuan Li (China) and Jia En Sit (Malaysia) worked with an Adelaide supermarket, taking hundreds of photos of food products across its bread, dairy, fresh produce and meat sections, and then analysed the resulting data.
“We had to take the information from the labelling in the photos and put it in a spreadsheet so we could examine how they compared across storage directions, usage directions and date labelling,” says Xuan Li.
Their findings will supplement the Fight Food Waste CRC’s major ‘Consumer Perceptions in the Role of Packaging in Reducing Food Waste’ research project, being led by the CRC’s Reduce team.
The trio are in their final year of a Bachelor of Food and Nutrition Science.
Reduce program leader Dr Dianne McGrath says the three students’ work has been invaluable in informing the ongoing research of the Consumer Perceptions work, and future date mark labelling and storage information projects.
“The work these students put in not only to capture so much data, but also to interpret and arrange the data in meaningful ways, has been exceptional,” McGrath said.
“The Fight Food Waste CRC already has a strong postgraduate program, with many opportunities available for PhD and Masters students.
“To see such commitment and dedication from these undergraduate students has been fantastic, and their work helps us as we strive towards our vision of Australia without food waste.”
For Jia En, undertaking the scholarship was an opportunity to combine her passion for reducing food waste with her studies.
“There’s a lot of food waste in the world, and we know that it contributes to greenhouse gas emissions,” Jia En says. “I’ve always had that personal interest in doing what I can to reduce food waste, and I think we all have that responsibility to reduce our waste outputs, including food.”
