Passively concerned: Horeca managers' recognition of the importance of food waste hardly leads to the adoption of more strategies to reduce it.

Recent works have found a negative correlation between the amount of food waste generated in foodservice outlets and the extent to which managers perceive it as a relevant problem. However, it is hard to believe that food flows would be impacted by wishful thinking alone. In this paper, we try to offer an explanation to these findings by testing the associations between importance recognition, food waste measurement and compliance to waste reduction strategies in three different stages (pre-kitchen, in-kitchen and post-kitchen).