Beyond the Attitude–Behaviour Gap: Systemic Alignment and the Structural Reproduction of Bread Waste

Bread waste remains a persistent sustainability challenge in industrialised food systems despite increasing environmental awareness and technological optimisation. Existing research typically examines food waste from isolated behavioural, retail, or manufacturing perspectives, thereby overlooking the cross-level dynamics through which surplus is structurally reproduced. This paper reconceptualises bread waste as a systemic coordination problem emerging at the retail–consumer interface, shifting the analytical focus from actor-specific deficits to cross-level misalignment. Building on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991), Institutional Theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Scott, 1995), and Information Processing Theory (Galbraith, 1973), the study develops the Systemic Alignment Framework. The framework explains how retail promotional volatility generates demand fluctuations, how manufacturers respond through structural buffering and conservative forecasting, and how consumers make disposal decisions under bounded rationality within abundance-oriented choice architectures. The interaction of these internally coherent yet unsynchronised logics systematically reproduces surplus. Methodologically, the study adopts an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, combining a representative survey of German consumers with qualitative interviews across retail and manufacturing actors. By triangulating behavioural, institutional, and informational lenses, the study identifies key mechanisms of misalignment and outlines conditions under which alignment across actors becomes possible. The findings provide actionable insights for aligning demand generation, production planning, and consumer decision environments, thereby enabling more effective and systemically coordinated waste reduction strategies.