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Title - Gauging the perceptions of residents of Kalavati Gupta

Hostel, New Delhi, regarding environmental impact of e-food
ordering

Authors: Aratrika Sen & Pallavi Singh

B.A. (Hons.) Economics, 2nd year

Indraprastha College for Women,

University of Delhi
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ABSTRACT

The exponential growth of the e-food retail industry and innovations therein, as high as 150%
year on year, rides on its 184.3 million consumers' ever-growing demand. Introduction of
customer flexibilities such as free deliveries and exorbitant discounts has further helped the food
industry's business model move from conventional to aggregator. However, this comes with costs
of unsustainable food consumption, food wastage, generation of substantial amounts of plastic
waste, and delivery costs. This paper aims to examine the attitudes associated with ordering food
online among undergraduate students residing in hostel and its subsequent impact on the
environment. It aims to examine the factors which influence the decision to order as well as
understand the environmental costs associated with it. Data has been collected using
questionnaires and presented via graphs and tabulation for ease of visual interpretation. The
study builds on the responses of the residents of the Kalavati Gupta Hostel, Indraprastha
College for Women, New Delhi.

Keywords: e-food ordering, environmental challenges, environmental economics.

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INTRODUCTION

The e-food retail sector has seen exponential growth worldwide, in the past decade. Owing
mostly to demand drivers like the growing size of the target demographic, rising disposable
incomes, and lifestyle changes favourable to it, the industry reached as high as USD 750 million
in 2017, registering a 150% revenue growth from 2016. The segment has been growing at a
progression ratio of 140% since 2014.

After the dotcom boom of 1996-2001 cooled off in the West, retail giants like Domino’s brought
in their e-operations. Introduced in India in 2007, this upgrade would later be seen as a beginning
in offering customer flexibilities to consumers in India. In 2008, Zomato started its online
restaurant research and discovery service to help customers decide where to dine. Till this stage,
the restaurant culture was at its peak with people dining-out.

As smartphone penetration increased in the 2011-2015 period, online food ordering services and
applications like Hello Curry, Swiggy and FoodPanda came up. These offered a way to discover
restaurants and order from food joints geographically proximate to the customer’s location. This
brought in the dining-in culture as the business model shifted from conventional to aggregator.
Customers now had increased convenience and greater variety to choose from even as
restaurants saw an increase in sales.

However, not all is rosy. Due to the wide variety of restaurants that customers can now choose
from, in a finite number of ‘clicks,’ restaurants face strict competition and the small-scale ones
find themselves caught in a trap of discounting food to incentivize consumption and paying high
platform fees just to stay in the market. Moreover, huge amounts of food wastage coupled with
plastic waste generated to make deliveries cost-effective for restaurants, add to the downside of
the behemoth industry. To cope with costs of running dual operations, newer modes of
businesses such as cloud and ghost kitchens, which only make food that is delivered, and do not
give the option for customers to dine at the location, have emerged. Despite this, the costs of
waste generation and unsustainable food consumption can’t be overlooked.

As per DownToEarth magazine, though India recycles a lot more plastic than developed nations,
it mainly entails downcycling or repurposing of plastic (2018). From teabags to plastic food
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containers, the packaging had been a major contributor to plastic pollution. In this decade, with
environmental challenges reaching new highs, attaining the goal of sustainable development – to
meet the needs of the present, without compromising the wants of tomorrow- is all the more
crucial.

On 2nd October 2019, the Government of India imposed a nation-wide single-use plastic ban,
which entailed scrapping the use of plastic bags, cups, spoons, bottles and sachets. As an
alternative, the packaging industry sought to manufacture products using polyester filament yarn,
which is reusable up to 45-50 times more than normal plastic. This landmark judgement,
however, has proven to be a setback for the food industry. Due to the lack of affordable and
viable alternatives to packaging, Indian food delivery platforms raised delivery costs three to
four times in response to the change. This ban may as well be seen as a tax on these industries by
the government, the burden of which is shared partly by the restaurants, and mostly by
consumers.

Seeing as the target consumer group of the e-food business is 18-40-year-old individuals
belonging to the middle class, this paper inspects the perceptions of hostel residents of Kalavati
Gupta Hostel of IPCW, located at the hub of student activity in North Delhi. With significant use
of such platforms being observed, a room to study the factors influencing the decision to order
was seen. Further, in light of the college’s waste management project Nidaan’s launch, this paper
aims to gauge the perceptions of residents regarding waste generated, among other costs of
ordering in.

Objectives

The objectives of this paper are three – first, to understand the attitudes of residents regarding e-
food ordering, second, to understand the environmental costs of ordering food online, and, third,
finding the relationship between the attitudes and environmental costs of ordering online.
Attitudes have been measured based on factors like weekly allowances, factors influencing
decision to order, frequency of ordering. Environmental costs have been identified using
information on the nature of containers and the way they are treated. Likert scale has been used
to bring the first two objectives together.
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The research is applied, exploratory, explanatory, and quantitative in nature.

Rationale

The rationale behind choosing this study was the need to understand how one’s seemingly
insignificant decision to order-in, adds up at the larger scale of a hostel community. As hostel
food is served on a rotational, weekly menu, the analysis has been done for weekly data. Our
research can help provide input to small-scale kitchens new to the aggregator model, in
understanding what aspects their target customers focus on while ordering. It can further help
students who are hostel residents to understand the impact of their decisions on the environment.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Vermier et al. (2006)

The study finds that although the awareness regarding environmental ills increases, behaviours
of individuals are not consistent with their attitudes. It aims at investigating the gap between
attitudes preferable for sustainable growth and actual behavioural intention to switch to
sustainable alternatives using an empirical study of 450 individuals, especially low availability of
sustainable alternatives and negative peer pressure to spend on unsustainable accounts for the
gap.

Parashar et al. (2017)

The study shows how consumers' behaviour shifts with the introduction of technology and the
role that it has played in the rise of online platforms. The study finds a significant relationship
between services offered by platforms and the purchases made from that platform. Cash On
Delivery was found to be the most preferred option for payment by customers even as the use of
e-wallets is on the rise.

Panse et al. (2005)

The study aims at explaining consumers' behaviour toward e-food ordering and examines the
effect of contemporary business models (aggregator) followed by e-retailers on the conventional
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restaurant businesses. The emergence of cloud kitchens etc. was found to reduce the cost of
production. It finds factors like satisfaction, technology anxiety, control, convenience, affect
consumer intentions significantly.

Anand (2011)

The study explores the impact of demographics and psychographics on the young consumer’s
choice towards fast food in Delhi, India. The key determinants impacting these fast food choices
were found to be a passion for eating out, socializing, better taste of fast food, and convenience
for dual-income families in urban India. Findings indicated that fast food companies can no
longer rely on convenience as a USP in India unless the implication of the same on the
consumer’s health is given equal importance in the years to come.

Negri (2004)

The study examines the growing importance of the e-commerce and food retailing industry. It
focuses on the environmental effects of building a business-to-consumer e-commerce platform,
and especially the consequent costs associated with home delivery practises. Results indicate that
the environmental effects of e-commerce home delivery are beneficial, provided that a large
number of consumers prefer to order food online than dine out. However, e-commerce may,
many times, be complementary to traditional shopping, rather than a substitute for it, in which
case emissions from home-delivery vehicles add to the already existent emissions of personal
vehicles in the atmosphere.

Barnes et al. (2011)

The paper examines the negative environmental impacts of Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), a
petroleum-based plastic component used in food packaging. Findings show that consumers, after
being made aware of the presence of EPS in food containers, are favouring the option of paying
for more environment-friendly food packaging options, which will also substantially reduce the
production costs of firms. The research also provides insight as to how decreasing EPS
consumption can help to reduce the global carbon footprint and the increasing rate of
environmental degradation.
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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This paper uses a cross-sectional, quantitative study design, which is prospective in nature,
taking into account the reference period. The sample of the study population taken is unbiased,
and representative of the entire population of Kalavati Gupta Hostel, IPCW, University of Delhi.
Non-random method of sampling is used, specifically, the Network or Snowball method of
sampling in which the research was conducted using an online survey form circulated among the
sample.

This study uses basic visual graphics like charts, graphs and bar diagrams to present a summary
of the data collected. These tools enhance comprehension even while being easy to read. Likert
scale has been used to understand the perceptions of the study group.

RESULT AND ANALYSIS

(i) The relation between the demand for ordering food and income per week.
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It is observed that, from a sample of 40 individuals taken from the study population, 10% order
food once a week, 35% twice a week, 27.5% thrice a week and 7.5%more than thrice. In
addition, 20% chose not to order food from outside every week. The relation between the
sample’s pocket money per week (income) and the frequency of ordering (demand) can be seen
with the help of an Engel Curve.

The theory of Engel Curves is used in this research for the purpose of mapping the relationship
between the demand for ordering food and income per week of each unit of the sample.

FREQUENCY OF ORDERING 0-500 500-1000 1000-1500 >1500

ONCE 3 0 1 0

TWICE 1 11 1 1
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THRICE 1 6 2 2

>THRICE 0 0 2 1

DO NOT ORDER EVERY WEEK 8 0 0 0

TOTAL 13 17 6 4

The Engel Curve plotted here shows that the frequency of ordering food initially increases when
the income levels are lower. However, as income increases, consumption of food from outside
decreases. Thus, the Engel Curve is backward bending. The portion of the curve that is
downward sloping may be seen as the income range in which ordering food becomes an inferior
good with an increase in income per week.

(ii) Reasons for ordering food.

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In the survey conducted, 70% of the sample was driven to ordering food from outside due to the
various offers and discounts available online, which reduced their cost of consumption. They
were also driven by other factors such as advertisements on social media (37.5%), cravings
(67.5%), peer influences (30%), and their desire to try new food.

The sample was also observed to order mainly on specific days to skip food cooked in the hostel
mess, followed by special occasions, and as a complement to mess food at times.
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(iii) Nature of containers.

With regards to the type of containers the food ordered came in, 47.5% of the sample answered it
to be non-reusable packaging (such as pizza cartons and aluminium foil) while 52.5% chose
reusable packaging (such as plastic boxes) as their answer. Out of the people choosing the
reusable container and cutlery option, 15% used these for cooking and eating purposes, 55% for
storage, and 30% disposed of these.

Plastic is in popular use mainly because industries consider it a cheaper and easier way of
protecting food from contamination as compared to materials like aluminium and other metals.
However, because they are non-biodegradable, plastics are more expensive to recycle and pollute
the environment if improperly disposed of.

There are several eco-friendly alternatives available on the market as a substitute for disposable
plastic packaging, such as cardboard, organic packaging, bioplastics, and so on. However, their
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implementation may prove to be a burden on the cost of production of industries, due to which
the delivery costs and prices of food may go up.

(iv) Measuring attitudes using the Likert scale.

The Likert scale is a psychometric scale used in this research for measuring the attitudes of the
respondents to certain suggestions in order to gauge their attitude towards the government's
initiative to make the nation completely free of single-use plastic by the year 2022.

1. Delivery by non-polluting vehicles. 65% of the sample voted this option to be effective.
In fact, this service has already been extended by the food-delivery platform Zomato,
which has upped its delivery game by using e-bikes and bicycles in an initiative termed
as "last-mile delivery fleet". This not only helps in reducing their carbon footprint and
creating additional employment opportunities but also help in tackling traffic and parking
issues.
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2. Non-issue of a printed bill. 45% of the sample considered this to be a neutral

suggestion. Although this will help in reducing wastage of paper in the short term, the
other environmental costs will eventually balance out its effect in the long run.

3. No plastic cutlery option. 47.5% of the population consider this an effective suggestion
to reduce plastic consumption, which is an unintended cost of ordering food. Opting for
this option more may make a dent in plastic pollution.

4. Increase in food delivery price due to plastic ban and a decline in health problems as
a result. Use of more sustainable packaging material may do it's not to help the
environment, but its implementation may be costly. As a result, consumers may not opt
for ordering food from outside, which may cause a size-able decline in the number of
health issues. However, if the alternative facing the respondents is food cooked in the
mess, they may perceive this to be a neutral policy at best.

(v) Consumers' perception of environmental costs.

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According to the sample, after being made aware of the myriad environmental costs of dining in,
80% responded that they would prefer going out, if not eating home-cooked meals, as this will
not only reduce the environmental costs but also play a role in promoting social interactions. The
increase in a number of sustainable food options which actively collaborate with local suppliers
and growers may also do its bit to boost the Indian economy, as well as help out
environmentally.

CONCLUSION
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Within the past decade, a majority of the youth’s decision to order is determined by e-food
ordering platforms owing to cheaper, more swiftly delivered, variety of alternatives available in a
limited number of clicks. Work need not be stopped to enjoy a meal and Rezende’s “search for
variety”is unquenched eating on-the-go. This desire for convenience and diversity, however, is
taking a toll on our environment. Although eating out is a popular trend, the majority of the
population is shown to prefer ordering food more frequently, and therefore contributing to
environmental costs such as encouraging the use of single-use plastic packaging, fuel emissions
from delivery vehicles, wastage of food already cooked, etc. As plastic pollution increases, steps
need to be taken, especially at the grassroots level for proper disposal and recycling, backed by
strong policy and enforcement. In this light, Project Nidaan of IPCW provides a way forward for
reducing single-use plastic consumption among the study population.The time to rethink our
lifestyle choices and educate ourselves with respect to sustainable patterns of consumption and
spending is now.

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