Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste

1. Abstract

The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale is a psychometric instrument developed by Audrey De Visser-Amundson, John Peloza, and Mirella Kleijnen (2021) to assess the degree, vividness, and cognitive salience with which consumers mentally associate food products—specifically rescued, surplus, or upcycled ingredients—with trash, refuse, decay, and bodily contamination. Embedded within the emerging intersection of consumer behavior, environmental psychology, and culinary sensory processing, the scale quantifies spontaneous mental simulation and visual imagery that evoke notions of physical waste upon exposure to rescue-based food marketing. Across multiple laboratory and field investigations, the instrument operates primarily as a unidimensional, three- to four-item construct rated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree or via bipolar semantic differential formats measuring vividness and connection. Psychometric evaluations across multiple consumer samples demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically exceeding .88 and reaching .94), high composite reliability, solid average variance extracted (AVE > .70), and distinct convergent and discriminant validity against adjacent psychological constructs such as perceived functional risk, nutritional valuation, and generalized pathogen disgust sensitivity. By capturing the subtle, often implicit mental imagery that triggers visceral consumer aversion, this measurement tool provides researchers and sustainable food enterprises with actionable empirical diagnostic power to pinpoint why well-intentioned sustainability and anti-waste marketing initiatives inadvertently trigger visceral rejection, while establishing empirical paths to mitigate negative visual associations.

2. Keywords

Imagery of food products, physical waste association, mental simulation, rescued food, food waste reduction, consumer disgust, sympathetic magic, contagion theory, sustainable consumer behavior, psychometric evaluation

3. Authors

The scale was developed and validated by an international team of marketing and consumer behavior researchers:

• Audrey De Visser-Amundson: Senior Researcher and Faculty Member in the School of Hospitality and Business, Hotelschool The Hague, The Netherlands. Her research investigates circular economy applications, sustainability initiatives, and consumer decision-making within the hospitality and food services sectors.
• John Peloza: Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of Research at the Carol Martin Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. His academic expertise centers on corporate social responsibility, prosocial behavior, consumer responses to ethical branding, and sustainable marketing communications.
• Mirella Kleijnen: Full Professor of Customer Experience Management at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculty of School of Business and Economics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research program focuses on customer journeys, psychological valuation, service innovation, and consumer resistance to technological and behavioral change.

4. Purpose

Globally, approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, prompting urgent interventions across the farm-to-fork continuum. One of the most promising market-based solutions involves commercializing “rescue-based food” (RBF)—food items manufactured from ingredients that were originally discarded, rejected due to superficial aesthetic flaws, surplus supply, or nearing their expiration dates, yet remain perfectly safe and wholesome for consumption. Despite significant environmental and economic rationale, rescue-based food initiatives frequently encounter severe resistance from retail consumers. The primary purpose of the Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale is to quantify the cognitive and perceptual mechanism driving this market failure: the involuntary activation of vivid, disgust-eliciting mental imagery connecting wholesome food to physical refuse.

From a theoretical perspective, marketing scholars previously recognized that consumers often express apprehension toward products involving recycled or reused materials. However, traditional models frequently attributed this hesitance to rational risk assessments, such as doubts regarding microbiological safety, structural durability, or price-to-quality ratios. The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale addresses a distinct, emotionally charged perceptual pathway. Rather than measuring a cold, deliberate calculation of functional risk, this scale measures the vivid, sensory-rich mental representations (visual, olfactory, and tactile simulations) wherein the consumer pictures the product sitting in a garbage bin, decomposing alongside spoiled matter, or being handled in unsanitary waste-management streams.

In empirical research, the scale serves as a crucial mediator explaining why promotional cues that highlight the amount of food rescued or the prevention of environmental waste can backfire. While anti-waste messaging is designed to stimulate altruistic and pro-environmental motives, the scale demonstrates that such framing directly primes mental representations of trash, increasing physical waste imagery, which subsequently triggers visceral disgust and depresses purchase intentions, willingness to pay, and product adoption. In commercial and clinical consumer settings, applying this instrument enables marketing strategists, sustainability communicators, and food product designers to pre-test messaging, packaging semantics, and visual branding. By measuring changes on this scale, practitioners can determine whether framing adjustments (such as emphasizing culinary craft, ingredient freshness, or flavor profiles rather than waste diversion) successfully attenuate the cognitive link to refuse, clearing the psychological barriers to sustainable consumption.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct assessed by this scale is the salience and vividness of mental imagery linking a consumer consumable product to physical waste. Psychologically, mental imagery refers to perceptual representations that occur in the absence of direct sensory input, functioning as a form of quasi-perceptual experience within working memory. In the context of consumer food evaluations, mental imagery operates as an embodied simulation process wherein individuals mentally envision the origin, history, handling, and environmental contexts of a food product.

When consumers evaluate standard consumer packaged goods, their mental simulations tend to focus on consumption experiences: taste, satiety, texture, and social dining contexts. However, when a product is explicitly categorized or framed as “rescued,” “salvaged,” or “diverted from waste streams,” the cognitive schema for “waste” is primed. The psychological construct quantified by De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021) captures the intensity, visual clarity, and spontaneous accessibility of this specific association. It is defined not merely as a cold semantic belief (e.g., “this product prevented waste”), but as a vivid, associative imagery construct characterized by three core psychological dimensions:

• Physical Refuse Connection: The degree to which the food item is cognitively anchored to garbage, trash bins, landfills, dumpsters, or discarded scrap materials. For example, a consumer evaluating a packaged soup manufactured from surplus root vegetables may involuntarily mentally simulate the vegetables resting at the bottom of a compost container.
• Decay and Devaluation Associations: The visual and sensory simulation of spoilage, tactile degradation, visual unwholesomeness, and physical disintegration. This dimension captures the consumer’s mental visualization of the food as having passed beyond the threshold of freshness into a compromised state, regardless of scientific pasteurization, sterilization, or culinary safety standards.
• Perceptual Contamination Salience: The mental accessibility of contagion, wherein the food product is mentally linked to the unsanitary environments typically occupied by refuse. Even if consumers acknowledge that the physical food product in front of them is pristine, the vividness of its imagined past association with waste triggers an affective state of revulsion.

Crucially, this construct diverges from general product quality evaluations. Two products may receive identical scores on perceived nutritional value or economic fairness, but the one eliciting elevated imagery of physical waste will suffer unique psychological penalties driven by disgust. The scale measures this specific, sensory-evocative mental link, providing insight into the automatic, implicit barriers that undermine pro-environmental decision-making.

6. Theoretical Framework

The scale is rooted in foundational psychological principles derived from disgust theory, the law of contagion within sympathetic magic, and embodied mental simulation theory.

Sympathetic Magic and the Law of Contagion

Pioneering anthropological and psychological research by Paul Rozin, Carol Nemeroff, and April Fallon demonstrated that human food evaluations are governed by primitive heuristic principles of sympathetic magic, specifically the law of contagion (“once in contact, always in contact”). Contagion theory posits that when an entity comes into physical contact with a source of pollution, contaminant, or negative essence, it permanently acquires that negative essence. Critically, this transfer occurs even when the contact is brief, indirect, or purely symbolic, and persists even after thorough, verified physical purification.

De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021) extended this theoretical framework to modern sustainable product evaluation. Rescued food products are often physically distinct from actual garbage; they are typically premium, untouched surplus items diverted before touching waste bins. Nevertheless, marketing communication that highlights “fighting waste” creates a symbolic cognitive bridge. The consumer’s mind applies the law of contagion, inferring that because the food was “destined for waste,” it has been permanently tainted by the essence of refuse. The scale directly captures the cognitive instantiation of this contagion process.

Mental Simulation and Embodied Cognition

The second pillar of the theoretical framework is mental simulation and mental imagery processing in consumer decision-making (MacInnis & Price, 1987; Elder & Krishna, 2012). According to embodied cognition theories, humans process linguistic and visual cues by running internal sensory-motor simulations. When reading the word “rescued from waste,” the consumer does not merely process an abstract semantic node; their brain automatically simulates the visual, tactile, and olfactory experiences associated with waste.

Research on consumer contamination by Morales and Fitzsimons (2005) demonstrated that simply placing an unhygienic product (e.g., feminine napkins or trash bags) next to a palatable food product (e.g., potato chips) inside a grocery cart induces emotional disgust and lowers purchase intentions, even when both products are hermetically sealed. The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale builds upon this insight: physical proximity is not required if mental imagery creates perceptual proximity. Once the imagery of physical waste is activated in working memory, it operates as an embodied perceptual input, automatically eliciting the evolutionary defense mechanism of pathogen avoidance: disgust.

The Dual-Pathway Processing Paradigm

The scale integrates into a dual-pathway model of consumer evaluation. On one hand, rescue-based marketing appeals to high-order, deliberate, cognitive processes (the moral and environmental value pathway), generating positive attitudes toward corporate environmental responsibility. On the other hand, the exact same marketing appeals inadvertently activate the low-order, automatic, sensory-imagery pathway (the physical waste imagery pathway), generating visceral revulsion. The psychometric instrument was engineered specifically to isolate and quantify this second, counterproductive pathway, allowing scholars to document how the sensory-affective response systematically undermines cognitive pro-environmental intentions.

7. Validity

The scale underwent empirical validation across a series of controlled experimental studies and structural equation modeling procedures reported in De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021), demonstrating high construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was established through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across diverse consumer samples evaluating multiple product categories (e.g., preserved jams, pre-cut vegetables, bakery goods, and soups made from surplus ingredients). Factor loadings for the items consistently exceeded .82, with several items exhibiting standardized loadings above .90, demonstrating that the items reliably capture the shared latent construct. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values across experimental studies consistently exceeded the recommended .50 threshold, regularly falling between .72 and .84. These high AVE metrics confirm that the variance captured by the construct is significantly greater than the variance attributable to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

To confirm that the scale measures a construct distinct from related attitudes and emotional reactions, discriminant validity was evaluated using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. The squared correlation between the imagery of physical waste scale and competing constructs—including generalized disgust sensitivity, perceived nutritional degradation, brand trust, general risk perception, and environmental concern—was significantly lower than the AVE for each corresponding latent variable. Specifically:

• Distinction from General Disgust: When tested alongside generalized pathogen disgust scales (e.g., the Disgust Propensity and Sensitivity Scale), the scale demonstrated distinct factor independence, confirming that it measures a stimulus-specific imagery response rather than a general personality trait.
• Distinction from Perceived Functional Risk: The scale showed moderate, but statistically distinct, correlations with functional risk ($r \approx .38$ to $.45$), proving that consumers differentiate between imagining physical garbage and cognitively evaluating whether a food item is safe to ingest.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Predictive and nomological validity were demonstrated through mediated regression models. The scale successfully predicted downstream behavioral outcomes across multiple scenarios:

• Attenuation of Purchase Intention: Elevations in imagery of physical waste scores directly predicted reductions in willingness to buy ($eta = -.42$, $p < .001$) and willingness to pay.
• Mediation of Rescue-Framing Effects: In mediation tests using bootstrapping procedures (5,000 resamples), the scale yielded an indirect effect with confidence intervals strictly excluding zero, proving that physical waste imagery mediates the negative effect of explicit waste-reduction claims on consumer product preferences.
• Moderation via Sensory Mitigators: When products were co-branded with artisan culinary certifications or presented with fresh, aesthetically appealing sensory cues, scores on the scale significantly declined ($F(1, 284) = 14.22, p < .001$), confirming that the instrument responds dynamically to theoretical interventions designed to attenuate refuse imagery.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale has been demonstrated across multiple independent samples in consumer research laboratories and online panel environments (e.g., Prolific, Amazon Mechanical Turk), spanning diverse national contexts (North American and Western European consumer cohorts).

Internal Consistency

Across the experimental studies documented by De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021), internal consistency metrics were well above accepted standards for psychometric research:

• Study 1: The initial validation sample yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .91$, with composite reliability (CR) recorded at $.92$.
• Study 2: In a replication investigating processed consumer food categories, the scale demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .89$ (CR = $.90$, AVE = $.75$).
• Study 3 & Study 4: Across subsequent experimental studies examining various messaging frames and culinary mitigators, Cronbach’s alpha values remained high, ranging from $\alpha = .88$ to $\alpha = .94$.
• Inter-Item Correlations: Corrected item-total correlations across all validation trials were consistently above $.70$, indicating that no individual item diluted the unidimensional internal cohesion of the instrument.

Test-Retest Stability and Cross-Sample Robustness

While the scale is primarily deployed as an acute state measure responsive to marketing framing manipulations, stability checks in control conditions revealed high test-retest correlations ($r > .80$) when measured across short intervals. Furthermore, multi-group confirmatory factor analysis confirmed metric and scalar invariance across gender and age groups, establishing that the instrument measures the underlying construct consistently across diverse demographic segments.

9. Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the instrument was confirmed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) during the scale development and validation phases.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During preliminary pilot testing, items measuring waste association, unhygienic origins, sensory disgust, and refuse visualization were submitted to principal axis factoring with promax (oblique) rotation. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy consistently exceeded $.86$, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was highly significant ($p < .001$), indicating sample suitability for factor extraction.

A single dominant factor emerged, with eigenvalues exceeding $2.8$, accounting for over $72%$ of the total variance. All candidate items loaded heavily onto this primary factor, with individual factor loadings ranging from $.81$ to $.93$, and cross-loadings remaining negligible (all < $.20$). This provided clear initial evidence for a parsimonious, unidimensional scale structure.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

To formally test the factor structure, structural equation modeling was conducted across multiple validation samples. The unidimensional model demonstrated good fit to the empirical data across all key goodness-of-fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently ranged between $.982$ and $.997$, well above the conventional $.95$ cutoff for excellent model fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values ranged between $.971$ and $.991$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates were between $.038$ and $.058$, with 90% confidence intervals spanning comfortably below the $.08$ benchmark for acceptable error.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values remained below $.025$, indicating minimal residual discrepancies between the observed and model-implied covariance matrices.

Competing models specifying multi-dimensional structures (e.g., separating visual imagery from semantic waste association) failed to achieve superior fit and resulted in excessively high factor correlations ($r > .88$), confirming that the unidimensional formulation represents the most parsimonious, psychometrically sound operationalization of the construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale is a self-report instrument designed for either independent psychometric administration or seamless integration into broader consumer survey panels.

• Test Type: Self-administered psychological assessment / consumer perception scale.
• Target Population: General consumer populations, adult grocery shoppers, institutional culinary evaluators, and participants in sustainable marketing trials.
• Administration Format: Digital (computer, tablet, smartphone survey interfaces) or paper-and-pencil questionnaire.
• Estimated Completion Time: 1 to 2 minutes.
• Item Count: 3 to 4 items (depending on the specific study iteration reported in De Visser-Amundson et al., 2021).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (typically anchored from $1 = \text{Strongly Disagree}$ to $7 = \text{Strongly Agree}$) or 7-point semantic differential scales (e.g., $1 = \text{Not at all connected to waste}$ to $7 = \text{Extremely connected to waste}$).
• Scoring Protocol:
  • All items are keyed in a single direction (positively reflecting the imagery of waste). There are no reverse-coded items.
  • An overall index score is calculated by computing the arithmetic mean of all completed items.
  • Higher scores represent stronger, more vivid mental imagery associating the target food item with physical refuse, trash, and contamination.
  • Lower scores represent an absence of waste imagery, indicating that the food item is perceived without negative cognitive associations to refuse.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was developed and published in 2021 by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in the Journal of Marketing Research:

• Publication Year: 2021.
• Copyright Holder: © 2021, American Marketing Association (AMA).
• Academic and Non-Commercial Research Access: The scale is published in the academic literature. Under standard fair-use guidelines and academic research conventions, scholars and students may utilize the scale for non-commercial, empirical research provided full and appropriate bibliographic credit is attributed to the original authors (De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, & Kleijnen, 2021).
• Commercial Usage & Licensing: Organizations, market research agencies, or corporate entities intending to deploy the scale in proprietary commercial testing, customer experience consulting, or fee-for-service enterprise software should consult the permissions desk of the American Marketing Association or contact the authors directly to verify licensing requirements.
• Fee: Free for independent academic, scholarly, and non-commercial research purposes via scientific citation.

12. References

The following academic publications provide the foundational theoretical framework, psychometric validation data, and methodological background for the scale:

• De Visser-Amundson, A., Peloza, J., & Kleijnen, M. (2021). How association with physical waste attenuates consumer preferences for rescue-based food. Journal of Marketing Research, 58(5), 870–887. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211012457
• Elder, R. S., & Krishna, A. (2012). The visual depiction effect in advertising: Facilitating embodied mental simulation through product orientation. Journal of Consumer Research, 38(6), 988–1003. https://doi.org/10.1086/660805
• MacInnis, D. J., & Price, L. L. (1987). The role of imagery in information processing: Review and extensions. Journal of Consumer Research, 13(4), 473–491. https://doi.org/10.1086/209082
• Morales, A. O., & Fitzsimons, G. J. (2005). Product contagion: How consumers react to products that have been touched by disgusting products. Journal of Marketing Research, 42(3), 272–281. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.42.3.272.66710
• Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. E. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological Review, 94(1), 23–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.94.1.23
• Rozin, P., Millman, L., & Nemeroff, C. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(4), 703–712. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.50.4.703

13. Items of the Scale