Entrepreneurial Temporal Design: Reframing the Sustainability Intention-Action Gap in Food Waste

Abstract

Persistent gaps between sustainability intentions and food-consumption behaviour remain poorly explained by attitudinal or informational accounts alone. Food-waste research shows that planning, shopping and storage routines are often more proximate predictors of household waste than stated intentions, while information-based interventions tend to produce limited or weakly sustained effects. This paper argues that part of the problem is temporal misalignment: sustainable food practices are often organised around retail or institutional rhythms that do not match how households plan meals, manage uncertainty or coordinate consumption. Entrepreneurship research has examined time mainly as a resource ventures manage internally, but less as a design variable through which ventures shape customer practices and sustainability outcomes. New ventures are especially relevant because they can build temporal structure into offerings before legacy channels, routines and customer expectations constrain redesign. The paper develops a framework of entrepreneurial temporal design for sustainable food consumption and identifies three mechanisms: rhythm alignment, which structures provision around household consumption patterns; communal synchronisation, which coordinates edible surplus with demand before discard; and routine embedding, which anchors low-waste practices in recurring behaviour. Illustrative venture examples are purposively selected to foreground one mechanism within a common consumer-facing food-waste market context; their common UK market setting aids comparison but bounds the immediate transferability of the illustrations. Four propositions are advanced, linking temporal design to reduced food waste, greater surplus utilisation, more durable behaviour change, and venture differentiation. By shifting attention from persuasion to temporal fit, the paper contributes an entrepreneurial and temporal-psychology-informed explanation of food-waste reduction that complements attitude- and information-based accounts. It concludes with a staged research agenda combining comparative case development with longitudinal or field-based testing across regions and venture types.