Recommendations that matter: Personalized suggestions for sustainable consumer choices in online supermarkets

Our food choices affect climate change and public health. Online supermarkets, as increasingly popular platforms for food purchases, have the potential to influence these choices. A promising intervention is personalized product recommendations, which are typically designed to align with consumer preferences and past behaviors. By incorporating sustainability criteria into these recommendations, online supermarkets can potentially promote sustainable grocery choices while maintaining relevance to consumers’ individual preferences. This thesis deepens the understanding of how such grocery product recommendations can be developed and implemented into an online grocery shopping environment in a technically feasible and consumer-accepted manner. Chapters 2 and 3 broadly explored the opportunities and barriers associated with developing and implementing product recommendations. Chapters 4 to 6 experimentally investigated what is recommended or personalized (the content or interface of the recommendation), and who drives the personalization of recommendations (the system or the consumer). The findings show that sustainability-focused recommendations promote sustainable choices, especially when accompanied by a personalized justification. Consumers appreciated support in identifying sustainable products and were willing to share data for more relevant recommendations. Furthermore, recommendations that integrate health and sustainability criteria performed similarly to preference-based ones in terms of recommendation accuracy. Experiments in a realistic online setting confirmed the behavioral impact of strategies such as prefilled baskets and landing pages featuring healthy products on consumer food choices. The landing page intervention also elicited positive consumer perceptions regarding the real-world acceptance of that strategy. Personalization of recommendations to align with consumers’ health goals resulted in more positive consumer perceptions of those recommendations. In conclusion, product recommendations can help mitigate the environmental and health impacts of our food choices, positioning them as a valuable strategy for implementation in online grocery stores and integration into policy initiatives that promote planetary and human well-being.