Food Quality and Preference 56 (2017) 294–300

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Food Quality and Preference

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/foodqual

An observational study of refrigerator food storage by consumers

in controlled conditions
Marine Masson, Julien Delarue, David Blumenthal ⇑
UMR Ingénierie Procédés Aliments, AgroParisTech, INRA, Université Paris-Saclay, 91300 Massy, France

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Europeans and North Americans produce a total of 95–115 kg of annual food waste per capita, which cor-
Received 9 October 2015 responds to more than one-third of the total food production in these countries. One of the different
Received in revised form 9 June 2016 assumptions presented in the literature is the food storage practices. With regards to food safety, poor
Accepted 23 June 2016
and unhygienic handling as well as inappropriate storage conditions at the consumer level are critical
Available online 24 June 2016
issues. Consumers do not consider the nature of the food in the organization of the refrigerator. To inves-
tigate this assumption, a methodology was developed to study consumer behavior while placing food in
Keywords:
the refrigerator. To approximate a home environment, the study was conducted in a test kitchen. Twenty
Refrigerator
Observational study
consumers participated in the study. The experiments were filmed with different camera systems (four
Food storage cameras fixed on the ceiling and one portable camera). The consumers were tasked with storing food
Food safety from delivery bags in the refrigerator and in a kitchen closet. They also completed a questionnaire about
Food waste their habits concerning food purchases and storage. This study reveals a wide diversity of behaviors for
storing food in the refrigerator. The recommendations from the French Agriculture and Food Department
are clearly not observed or even known. The main safety issues concern meats, ready-to-eat salads, and
ready-made dough because they are sensitive to contamination with pathogens.
Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction
In a world with limited natural resources (land, water, energy)
and where cost-effective solutions are yet to be found to produce
sufficient safe and nutritious food for all, reducing food losses
should not be a forgotten priority (FAO, 2011). In addition to being
the world’s major consumers of food, Europeans and North
Americans are also estimated to be the world’s most wasteful, with
a total of 95–115 kg of annual food waste per capita (FAO, 2011),
which corresponds to more than one third of the total food
production in these countries.
In Europe, the largest part of food waste occurs at the consumer
level (EPRS, 2014). Public authorities have gained knowledge of
this issue and now support research programs on food waste.
The present study relates to one of these programs sponsored by
the French Government.
Various reasons may explain food waste in Western countries.
They range from shopping and consumption behaviors (especially
the weekly grocery shopping habit that is widespread in many
households) to food safety issues. For example, previous studies
have identified several variables related to food waste: the
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: david.blumenthal@agroparistech.fr (D. Blumenthal).
household size (the larger the household, the more food is wasted
(Williams, Wikström, Otterbring, Löfgren, & Gustafsson, 2012), the
number of children in the household (Parizeau, von Massow, &
Martin, 2015), the age of the persons responsible for food
preparation (Watson & Meah, 2012), the amount of money spent
on groceries (Parizeau et al., 2015), the lack of planning, unforeseen
events and the frequency of shopping trips (Williams et al., 2012),
and the failure to comply with minimum food safety standards
(WRAP, 2011).
With regards to food safety, poor and unhygienic handling as
well as inappropriate storage conditions at the consumer level is
a critical issue (WRAP, 2011). In fact, foodborne pathogens cause
48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations and 3000 deaths
per year in the United States (Teisl, Lando, Levy, & Noblet, 2016).
Improper refrigeration is one of the top factors of major routes of
food handling failures (Taché & Carpentier, 2014). Many of us are
unaware of the importance of storing food at the right temperature
and of what food can be frozen (WRAP, 2013). Moreover,
refrigerators are often too warm (Marklinder, Lindblad, Eriksson,
Finnson, & Lindqvist, 2004; Terpstra, Steenbekkers, De
Maertelaere, & Nijhuis, 2005; WRAP, 2013).
As a matter of fact, food poisoning risks may be either feared
or underestimated by consumers, which may lead to either
unnecessary food waste or food safety issues.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2016.06.010
0950-3293/Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
 M. Masson et al. / Food Quality and Preference 56 (2017) 294–300
At the heart of this problem is the use of the refrigerator and
related food storage behavior, yet little is actually known about
how consumers behave in this regard. As highlighted by
Aschemann-Witzel, de Hooge, Amani, Bech-Larsen, and
Oostindjer (2015) in their systematic review of 57 articles and
reports (published between 2004 and 2014) about food waste,
few studies have focused on topics such as food provisioning, stor-
age, packaging, date-labelling or appearance. In fact, even less is
known about the events after purchase (Altekruse, Street, Fein, &
Levy, 1996; Marklinder et al., 2004; Meredith, Lewis, & Haslum,
2001; Terpstra et al., 2005). Therefore, we focused our study on
food storage in refrigerators.
Various approaches can be used to study consumers’ food stor-
age behaviors. Terpstra et al. (2005) proposed a study of consumer
behavior and knowledge concerning food storage and disposal by
at-home interviews. They found that most of the 33 Dutch con-
sumers interviewed handled meat and dairy products relatively
hygienically but that the storage of products in other categories
was more prone to risks. Teisl et al., 2016, analyzed trends in safe,
at-home food-handling practices, including food storage, using
cohorts and questionnaires. Interestingly, they found that in the
U.S.A., women and less-educated individuals had safer handling
practices. They also showed that both the youngest and oldest con-
sumers have the worst food handling behaviors while those in
their late 40–60 s behave more safely.
However, Visschers, Wickli, and Siegrist (2016), raised the issue
of the bias of self-reporting measures of food waste using question-
naires. In (2003), Redmond and Griffith analyzed 87 consumer food
safety studies using different research methodologies: survey tech-
niques (questionnaires and interviews), direct observation and
focus groups. They found out that survey responses provided a
more optimistic portrayal of consumer food safety behavior than
the data obtained from focus groups and direct observation, which
may thus be promoted.
Our study follows a sociological and anthropological study on
the use of food in houses after purchase in France. During this
study, 600 pictures of real refrigerators were taken. Although the
study of these pictures provides very interesting insights into the
diversity of food storage at home, we could not investigate the pro-
cess of storing the food which was not observed. For this purpose,
we focused in our study on the food storage practices by direct
observation with regard to the recommendations issued by the
French Agriculture and Food Department about fresh food storage.
The objectives of this study were: i) to develop a methodology
to study consumer behavior while placing food in the refrigerator,
ii) to confirm whether recommendations from the Agriculture and
Food department are followed by consumers and iii) to identify
risky behaviors concerning health.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Participants
In this study, we focused on families with at least one child. This
is our main recruitment criteria. Participants had to be responsible
for grocery shopping and storage in their household.
For this observational study, we selected a total of 20 untrained
volunteers (7 men, 13 women; aged between 31 and 60
(Mean = 49.5, Std = 7.4)). All participants owned a two-
compartment family refrigerator. Half of the participants were
high school graduates while the other half had a college degree.
The households comprised three persons for ten participants and
four persons or more for the other ten (Mean = 3.65, Std = 0.75).
For thirteen of them, there was at least one child under 18 in the
household (Mean = 1.53, Std = 0.66).
295
As the participants were all employees at the AgroParisTech
center (Massy, France), they were chosen among the administra-
tive staff and therefore had no extensive knowledge of food
science, microbiology or quality control.
2.2. Sessions
The study was conducted in a test kitchen equipped with a
standard refrigerator. The refrigerator was a Liebherr CNesf 304
with a total capacity of 290 L. It was equipped with a fridge com-
partment (200 L - upper part) and a freezer compartment (lower
part). The refrigerator had two shelves at 0–4 °C, two shelves at
4–6 °C and one crisper drawer; the door had three shelves. The
refrigerator was equipped with an alarm which would buzz when
the door stayed opened for more than 60 s.
Basic food items (ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, pâté
and orange juice) were placed in the refrigerator before the start
of the sessions. These items were defined according to a prelimi-
nary survey conducted separately with a panel of consumers
returning from vacations. This was done to mimic real-life condi-
tions where a refrigerator is never totally empty.
The kitchen was equipped with a trash bin and a sink where
they could wash their hands. The experiments were filmed with
four NoldusÒ dome cameras fixed on the ceiling and one portable
camera from GoproÒ. The sessions were individualized and orga-
nized in three successive stages as described below.
2.3. Experimental protocol
The experiment was designed according to three successive
stages to allow participants to engage in their usual food storage
habits as much as possible. All of the stages were conducted on
an individual basis. We wanted the participants to behave as nat-
urally as possible and not to focus on the storage task. Accordingly,
we did not want them to discover the food they would have to
store in the refrigerator at the last moment, which would have
seemed odd. Consequently, as a priming, we explained to them
that the main objective was to study the usability of grocery store
websites on computer screens.
In the first step, the consumers were thus provided with a shop-
ping list of food items which they had to order from a grocery web-
site using a laptop computer at their disposal.
The shopping list comprised different groups of foods chosen to
be as close as possible to a usual shopping list (as defined from a
preliminary study). To divert the attention of participants from
the refrigerator during the storage task, the list included refriger-
ated foods, dry foods (dry biscuits, sugar, coffee, flour, rice, tea,
and pasta) as well as beverages (white vine, orange juice, milk,
and soda). The refrigerated food items (vegetables, meat products,
dairy products, and ready-to-eat products) were selected to
encompass all recommended areas of storage (shelf 0–4 °C, shelf
4–6 °C, crisper drawer and door).
After the task of ordering the food on the website, we ‘‘deliv-
ered” the shopping bags with the food items on the list just like
a standard delivery service (the items were randomly placed into
three bags). The participants were then asked to store the delivered
food in the refrigerator or in the kitchen closets at their disposal.
Finally, in the third stage, participants were asked to fill a small
questionnaire relating to their habits concerning food purchase
and storage (Table 1) as well as socio-demographic information.
2.4. Video coding and data analysis
Data analysis was performed according to key recommenda-
tions from the French Agriculture and Food Department and
hypotheses relating to food waste from the literature. The main
296 M. Masson et al. / Food Quality and Preference 56 (2017) 294–300

Table 1 behavioral points that we analyzed are summarized in Table 2

Questions about habits of consumers.
Topic Questions
Food purchase Who in your household shops for groceries?
How often do you (or someone from your household)
go grocery shopping?
Food storage Who stores the groceries away at home?
Meal preparation Who prepares the meals at home?
Do you shop according to pre-established menus?
Refrigerator What is the temperature of your refrigerator?
According to you, what was the total value of the
groceries you just stored away?
according to a chronological progression (from food purchase and
preparation to food storage).
Each participant was filmed. The videos obtained were encoded
in data with NOLDUS Information Technology (Wageningen, The
Netherlands). For this purpose, we first segmented the kitchen
and the inner refrigerator space into different disjunctive locations
(the plastic bags, the counter, the kitchen closet, the door of the
refrigerator, the crisper drawer, the lower shelves (0–4 °C), the
upper shelves (4–6 °C) and in the hands of the participant coded
‘‘air”), and we coded each change of position of products from
one area to another. Thus, for each participant, we obtained a spa-
tial and temporal evolution of each product positioning.
For example, for participant C1 (Fig. 1):

Table 2
 The crème fraiche (sour cream) container stayed more than 30 s
Critical behavioral points according to official key recommendations to prevent in the shopping bag. It was in the hand of the participant (coded
foodborne illness. ‘‘in the air”) from the bag to the refrigerator for 5 s. The cream
Stages Key recommendations Number
arrived on the lower shelf of 4–6 °C 45 s after the beginning of
the experiment.
Preparation The set point temperature of the refrigerator 1
before food is 4 °C
 The tomatoes with their packaging stayed in the shopping bag
storage One must wash hands before storing food 2 for approximately 70 s. The packaging was removed on their
The food packaging must be removed before 3 way to the refrigerator. They arrived in the crisper drawer
storing food approximately 85 s after the products were delivered.
Food storage The refrigerated food must be stored first 4
The refrigerator must not stay open for a long 5 In addition, for each participant we counted the occurrences of
time
refrigerator opening as well as the duration of each opening.
The food must be stored according to its 6
nature and the gradient of temperature in the For example, as shown in Table 3, the first participant, C1, took
refrigerator 186 s to store food. Immediately, C1 stored yogurts: they stayed
1.4 s in the plastic bag and 6.6 s ‘‘in the air.” The yogurts stayed

Fig. 1. Spatial and temporal evolution of some products for consumer C1.
 M. Masson et al. / Food Quality and Preference 56 (2017) 294–300 297

Table 3 behaviors. A detailed analysis of each critical behavioral point is

Extract from the data encoded with NOLDUS (Time in second). presented below.
Participant Behaviors Total Total Total
duration duration duration
for dry for yogurt for fresh 3.1. Preparation before food storage (recommendations #1, #2, #3)
biscuits cream
C1 Air 4.8 6.6 7.0 Twelve out of twenty participants said they did not know the
C1 Kitchen closet 34.0 – – temperature in their refrigerator, five participants answered 4 °C,
C1 Bag 147.3 1.4 37.3 and the remaining three answered 5 °C, 6 °C and 7 °C. Additionally,
C1 Counter – – –
none of them mentioned a gradient of temperature that may occur
C1 Crisper drawer – – –
C1 Shelf 4–6 °C – 178.1 141.8 before or during food storage in the refrigerator. Thus, only five
C1 Shelf 0–4 °C – – – participants have their refrigerator set at the correct temperature
C1 Door of the – – – according to recommendation #1. No participants washed their
refrigerator hands before storing food. Therefore, no one complied with recom-
Total (sec) 186.1 186.1 186.1 mendation #2. Only six out of the twenty participants removed the
outer packaging of yogurts (individual yogurt containers usually
come overwrapped in France) and vegetables. Only three partici-
pants removed the outer packaging of yogurts, and only four
removed the packaging of vegetables (recommendation #3).
Table 4
Binary variables used and associated critical behavioral points.

Binary variables Associated 3.2. Handling of the products during storage (recommendations #4,
behavioral point #5, and #6)
Participants wash their hands (Yes/No) (2)
Packaging of yogurts is removed (Yes/No) (3) On average, the food storage process lasted 7 min and 12 s
Packaging of vegetables is removed (Yes/No) (3) (standard deviation = 2 min and 36 s). On average, refrigerated
Participants stored refrigerated food first (Yes/No) (4)
Participants placed all items in the counter before (6)
foods were left outside of the refrigerator 3 min and 24 s (approx-
starting to store (Yes/No) imatively half of the total time for food storage). We analyzed
Participants empty each plastic bag before starting to (6) these results according to the binary variable ‘‘Participants stored
store items (Yes/No) refrigerated food first.” Less than half of the participants stored
refrigerated food first (8 participants). However, storing refriger-
6.6 + 1.4 = 8 s outside and 178 s in the 4–6 °C shelf of the refriger- ated food first does not necessary imply that it is left outside of
ator. We obtained a similar matrix for each participant with each the refrigerator for less time (Fig. 2). It appears that this strategy
product. is not optimal for limiting food temperature changes.
Finally, during the coding of the videos, we focused on binary In the second step, we tried to identify differences between the
variables as presented in Table 4. types of products. An ANOVA with participant and type of products
The data were analyzed with ANOVA models, Chi2 tests and as fixed effects was performed on the time fresh food was left out-
exact tests of Fisher using XLStat 2015. side. No significant effect (F3,280 = 0.58; p = 0.63) was observed for
the type of product (ready-to-eat food, dairy products, meat prod-
ucts and vegetables). On the contrary, the participant effect is
3. Results
significant (F19,280 = 14.38; p < 0.0001) as shown in Fig. 2.

From the coded video sequences, we first aimed at identifying

how many participants behaved in compliance with official recom-
mendations before and during storage.
These official recommendations were not provided to the
participants. It is thus interesting to check their prior knowledge
regarding these good practices before analyzing their actual
3.3. Use of the specific areas of the refrigerator (recommendation #6)
The French Agriculture and Food Department recommends that
food be stored in specific areas of the refrigerator according to the
following typology:

Fig. 2. Average time food is left outside of the refrigerator (Black histograms represent consumers who stored refrigerated food in first).
298 M. Masson et al. / Food Quality and Preference 56 (2017) 294–300
 The area between +4 °C and +6 °C: homemade meals, cooked
vegetables and fruits, home-cooked meat and fish, yogurts
and fully ripe cheese.
 The area between 0 °C and +4 °C: meats, cooked pork meats,
poultry, fishes, creams, opened fresh products, cream cheeses,
fresh fruit juices, ready-to-eat salads, and defrosting products.
 The crisper drawer: washed fresh vegetables and fruits, and
refining cheeses (within packages).
 The door: eggs, butter, milk, and opened fruit juices.
Although we knew that the concept of a temperature gradient
was not clear to the consumers, we wanted to know if our partic-
ipants would store foods according to their nature and the gradient
of temperature in the refrigerator.
Considering only the 18 items to be placed in the refrigerator
(the others had to be stored in the kitchen closets), the average
number of correctly placed items is 10.5 (from 5 to 15, Std = 3.1).
Tomatoes and zucchinis were the products that were most often
stored in the right place (18 and 20 times, respectively, as shown
in Fig. 3). However, 18 of the 20 participants did not differentiate
between vegetables and ready-to-eat salads, which were very
rarely placed in the right place, the 0–4 °C shelf; in fact, they were
more often placed in the crisper drawer.
The correct location for meats, the 0–4 °C shelf, was used
between 10 to 13 times. This was the same for ready-to-eat foods.
Moreover, meats and ready-to-eat foods seemed to be randomly
located or at least without taking into account the temperature
gradient.
The differentiation between the different types of cheeses and
their correct location is also not clear for half of the participants.
Camembert cheese and Emmental cheese were stored in the same
area.
In addition to this analysis of product positioning inside the
refrigerator, we were also interested in the way participants man-
aged the opening of the refrigerator when storing food.
Participants’ opening behaviors were thus analyzed by plotting
the number of openings by the duration of each opening for each
participant as represented in Fig. 4 where each dot corresponds
to one subject.
The lower left-hand quarter represents the ‘‘best” behavior
within the study: the number of openings is low, and the total
Fig. 3. Total number of correctly placed items for the 20 consumers.
occurrence of fridge opening is low. The upper-right quarter corre-
sponds to the opposite and worst behavior.
The variety of the behaviors is obvious: 8 participants were in
the ‘‘best” quarter, some participants left the refrigerator opened
longer (C15 and C20 for example), and some participants fre-
quently opened the refrigerator but for a small duration each time.
Finally, we observed that participants differed according to
three strategies:
 Participants who empty each shopping bag one after the other.
 Participants who place all items on the counter before starting
to store them. Globally, the participants using the counter to
sort out the items stored the refrigerator food first.
 Participants who start by storing refrigerated items.
There are no significant links between these three criteria and
the questions about the use and attitudes towards shopping and
refrigerators (exact Fisher test at 5%).
4. Discussion
The methodological study described in this paper allowed us to
investigate the possibility of observing the behavior of consumers
in a controlled yet naturalistic (i.e., approximating reality) environ-
ment. From their comments after the test, it was clear that asking
participants to order their shopping list online before the food
products were delivered allowed them to engage in their usual
food storage habits and to naturally proceed with the actual test
in the second stage. As a matter of fact, the participants’ practices
during the test varied greatly from one subject to another. In addi-
tion, most of them widely deviated from official recommendations.
Should they be generalized, the results of this study would be
alarming. The recommendations from the Agriculture and Food
department are indeed far from being respected.
The average number of correctly placed refrigerated items was
10.5 out of 18. Not only was this ‘‘global” score fairly mediocre but
also some items were ‘‘easier” to place than others. For example,
the crisper drawer is a rather specific place, and foods that should
be placed there appeared to be easily identified by consumers. This
could explain why tomatoes and zucchinis were the products most
often stored in the right place. As this drawer is a rather specific
 M. Masson et al. / Food Quality and Preference 56 (2017) 294–300
Fig. 4. Representation of consumers according to number of times the door is opened and the duration of the door opening.
place, it seems that participants strongly associated fresh vegeta-
bles to this compartment despite the pictures from the sociological
and anthropological study mentioned in the introduction clearly
showing that this compartment is frequently used for any type of
food.
Concerning the improper storage, some errors are less serious
than others. The fact that the cheeses were not stored according
to the maturing time is not a concern because it is not a health
matter. On the contrary, the fact that vegetables and ready-to-
eat salads were considered as the same type of product by con-
sumers is an issue because of the pathogens that can be found
in ready-to-eat salads. Moreover, meat and ready-to-eat foods
seemed to be placed in the refrigerator without consideration of
the temperature gradient. This is also a health concern. This result
is not coherent with that of Terpstra et al. (2005), who found that
Dutch consumers handle meat and dairy products relatively
hygienically.
The fact that participants did not know the average temperature
of their own fridge as well as the lack of awareness of the temper-
ature gradient in refrigerators is striking. It is also not a good indi-
cator for compliance with the recommendations. It is, however,
consistent with previous results from the literature (Marklinder
et al., 2004; Terpstra et al., 2005).
Moreover, in spite of the ‘‘OK” sign printed on the inner wall of
the refrigerator, our participants did not know the location of the
colder shelf where the most sensitive food should be stored and
did not even ask for it. That can be a cause of the incorrect storage
behaviors we observed. Another cause could be that participants
took other constraints into account (practicality, available volume
in the fridge. . .). However, the design of our study did not allow for
testing this hypothesis. Further studies in this direction would be
interesting to understand how consumers prioritize in their food
storage behavior.
The use of video cameras was of great value for analyzing
behaviors. Although participants knew they were filmed and
signed a consent form, they quickly forgot the cameras and
behaved quite spontaneously. Partitioning the kitchen and the
refrigerator into several areas is an efficient way to code the videos.
Even if the coding scheme that we used was quite simple, there
299
was a need to find the trade-off between the time requested for
coding and the wealth of information produced. Video coding is
indeed very time-consuming. The use of a coding software is quite
intuitive and allows faster coding, but we estimate that approxi-
mately 90 min are needed to code a 60-min video. We imagine that
for this type of experiment real-time coding would allow us to be
quicker.
Even with a relatively small number of participants for this
observational study, we were able to reveal misbehaviors for
refrigerated food storage.
It would also be interesting to link these results to consumers’
knowledge about food safety in general. However, many studies
highlight the lack of a link between food safety knowledge and
behavior, indicating that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient
to induce behavioral change (Taché & Carpentier, 2014).
5. Conclusions
Beyond the first-level outcomes of this study, which are neces-
sarily limited given the relatively small number of participants, we
would like to stress that, to our knowledge, this study was the first
study to experimentally investigate food storage behavior under
controlled and yet naturalistic conditions. The use of videos to
observe the behavior of consumers storing food in a refrigerator
was feasible and provided insights that can be very complemen-
tary to more traditional social surveys or even pictures of con-
sumers’ refrigerators at home.
This study reveals a wide diversity of behaviors for storing food
in the refrigerator. The recommendations from the French Agricul-
ture and Food Department are clearly not observed or even known.
The main safety issues concern meats, ready-to-eat salads, and
ready-made dough because they are sensitive to contamination
by pathogens.
Acknowledgments
This work received support from the French National Research
Agency – France under the ‘‘Investissements d’Avenir” program
(reference No. ANR-11-IDEX-0003-02).
300 M. Masson et al. / Food Quality and Preference 56 (2017) 294–300

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