Research & Working Papers.

Despite being safe, nutritious, and edible, unattractive (“ugly”) fruits and vegetables are frequently rejected by consumers, contributing substantially to food waste. This research advances a consumer-centered account of acceptance of unattractive produce by showing that compassion serves as an affective pathway guiding choice. Across four laboratory studies and a field study, we demonstrate that consumers high in compassion are more likely to prefer unattractive produce, and that this effect unfolds through a distinct sequence of noticing the produce’s condition, feeling for it, and responding by purchasing it. Crucially, this process operates independently of quality-based evaluations such as perceived taste and healthiness and does not rely on anthropomorphism. We further show that compassion is target-specific: it predicts responses to unattractive but not normal-looking produce. At the same time, consumers low in compassion are systematically less inclined to accept unattractive produce due to their reluctance to engage with its perceived inferiority. Drawing on evidence that inferior and excluded targets are associated with weakness, we demonstrate that strength-based messaging increases acceptance of unattractive produce among low-compassion consumers in the field. Together, the findings illuminate compassion as a previously underexamined driver of consumer choice and offer a theoretically grounded, managerially scalable intervention to reduce appearance-based food waste.