To Reduce Food Waste, Tweak the Food Supply Chain, Researcher Says

Each year, around 88 mil­lion tons of food are dis­carded in Europe with ensu­ing costs esti­mated at €143 bil­lion, says the web­site of the European Commission. This is a tremen­dous waste when 795 mil­lion peo­ple around the world are expe­ri­enc­ing food inse­cu­rity.

In the devel­oped world, it is pri­mar­ily the well-fed inhab­i­tant that throws away food. There is, how­ever, another cul­prit that comes in close sec­ond: the food sup­ply chain and its three stages of pro­duc­tion, whole­sal­ing and retail­ing, as Kristina Liljestrand, an expert in sus­tain­able food logis­tics and researcher at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, revealed.

“By tweak­ing the logis­tics sys­tems, we can ensure that the food main­tains good qual­ity and lasts as long as pos­si­ble when it reaches the store,” Liljestrand said.

In her research titled ​“Reducing the Environmental Impact of Food Products Logistics Systems,” Liljestrand attempted to study how both food waste and the envi­ron­men­tal impact at the food-sup­ply-chain level can go down. Through an exten­sive study among Swedish pro­duc­ers, whole­salers and retail­ers, she iden­ti­fied nine improve­ment actions by divid­ing them into four types.

First, there is ​“Visualization,” which con­cerns under­stand­ing where and why envi­ron­men­tal impact occurs with the help of frame­works, tools, and processes. In the study, it mainly involved whole­salers and retail­ers,” said Liljestrand.

Second comes ​“Flow.” ​“Changes to the flow imply long-term adjust­ments to the mate­r­ial or infor­ma­tion flow in order to reduce the envi­ron­men­tal impact of the logis­tics sys­tems and, coin­ci­den­tally, make the logis­tics sys­tems more effi­cient.

“Such changes were often made by joint deci­sion-mak­ing between the stages in the food sup­ply chain. These solu­tions were often tra­di­tional logis­tics oper­a­tions that the actors in the study exe­cuted in order to reduce food waste. For exam­ple, good solu­tions were col­lab­o­ra­tive fore­cast­ing and make-to-order flows, which applied to all three groups of actors,” explained the researcher.

Third, the food sup­ply chain ought to think of ​“Changing Performance Priorities.”

“Changing per­for­mance pri­or­i­ties is linked to alter­ing logis­tics per­for­mance vari­ables used to describe the objec­tives of the logis­tics sys­tems — that is, to ques­tion­ing the effec­tive­ness of logis­tics sys­tems. The main per­for­mance vari­ables that were altered in order to reduce food waste were assort­ment, ser­vice level and lead times.

“One exam­ple is to lower demands on assort­ment or ser­vice level dur­ing lim­ited time peri­ods with large amounts of food waste, for exam­ple at the end of a sea­son (e.g. Christmas hams at Christmas Day). This group of solu­tions was mainly applied by whole­salers and retail­ers.”

Last, Liljestrand said, ​“Emergency solu­tions are applied in response to an imme­di­ate risk of food waste not mit­i­gated by other iden­ti­fied solu­tions. This could, for exam­ple, be done by reduc­ing the price of food prod­ucts with short shelf lives. Emergency solu­tions were used by all stages in the food sup­ply chain.”

In the sec­ond part of her research, Liljestrand focused on the envi­ron­men­tal impact of the activ­i­ties of the food sup­ply chain. She exam­ined aspects like the load fac­tor (the opti­mal use of space in pal­lets, crates and trucks) or the pro­por­tion of inter­modal trans­ports. This resulted in two frame­works that pro­vided great help in the quest to reduce trans­port emis­sions.

“The Transport Portfolio Framework (TPF) is a tool for sup­port­ing deci­sion-mak­ing that scru­ti­nizes logis­tics sys­tems from the per­spec­tive that they encom­pass many ship­ments with dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics that impose require­ments for transport’s impact on cli­mate. Actors, there­fore, need to under­stand which ship­ments have a strong poten­tial for improv­ing the key vari­ables of modal split and load fac­tor.”

“The Matrix for Evaluating Improvement Actions (MEIA) eval­u­ates how dif­fer­ent improve­ment actions affect transport’s impact on cli­mate and trans­port costs.”

The Chalmer Technology the­sis found that both frame­works com­ple­ment each other: ​“The TPF can be applied when actors want an overview of their entire logis­tics sys­tem, while the MEIA can be applied when they want to com­pare improve­ment actions,” con­tin­ued Liljestrand.

Her research clearly showed that there is money to be made by increas­ing the load fac­tor and focus­ing more on inter­modal trans­port, and that col­lab­o­ra­tion plays a key role in how food is dis­trib­uted.

“Intermodal trans­port is thought to decrease both trans­port costs and impact on cli­mate, since a large part of all trans­port, dubbed ​‘the long leg,’ is car­ried out at high capac­ity, which makes it cost-effec­tive and envi­ron­men­tally ben­e­fi­cial to reduce each load­ing unit’s impact on cli­mate.”

“On the other hand, an impor­tant find­ing of the study was that no solu­tion involved only one stage in the food sup­ply chain. Three of my logis­tics solu­tions tran­scend all three sup­ply chain stages, whereas the other six solu­tions include two stages.

“My find­ings imply that col­lab­o­ra­tion is impor­tant and that reduc­ing food waste with­out col­lab­o­ra­tion is dif­fi­cult,” con­cluded Liljestrand, who hopes that her research can inspire the var­i­ous actors in the food sup­ply chain to under­stand that in order to suc­cess­fully reduce food waste and tackle envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges, they need to col­lab­o­rate.

• Kristina Liljestrand


• European Commission