Students’ Food Consumption Behavior during COVID-19 Lockdown

This study is experimental in nature. The cognitive purpose of this study is to examine the reduction in food waste by students in the economic process during the lockdown. The normative goal is to identify drivers of social rationality of ex ante food stewardship by students, by reducing food waste. The subjects of the study consisted of students from the Faculty of Economics and Management at the University of Zielona Góra, Poland. To achieve the study’s goal, we use Consumer 4.0 model and develop one main hypothesis and six working hypotheses. The hypotheses were verified, and the study’s goals were achieved by employing desk research, followed by the descriptive, comparative, survey, and model methods, accompanied by deduction, induction, descriptive statistics, and visualization. The comparative method was used to perform the study in two periods—lockdown (S1) and pandemic threat (S2)—and to compare with the results of other authors. The model method was used to reflect the factor gap in consumer behavior. The conclusion stipulates that during the lockdown and pandemic risk period the behavior of students was similar and did not reflect food saving by deliberately reducing waste. The reason for this was the demonstrated gap of intangible factors, defined by their weakness, in both analyzed periods, in relation to their optimal level in the theoretical Consumer 4.0 model. This study determined a gap caused by the weakness of intrinsic factors during the lockdown and pandemic risk between the typical student behavior model and the theoretical model of Consumer 4.0, with respect to food-saving practices.