An Investigation into Factors Affecting the Chilled Food Industry

With the advent of Industry 4.0, many new approaches towards process monitoring, benchmarking and traceability are becoming available, and these techniques have the potential to radically transform the agri-food sector. In particular, the chilled food supply chain (CFSC) contains a number of unique challenges by virtue of it being thought of as a temperature controlled supply chain. Therefore, once the key issues affecting the CFSC have been identified, algorithms can be proposed, which would allow realistic thresholds to be established for managing these problems on the micro, meso and macro scales. Hence, a study is required into factors affecting the CFSC within the scope of Industry 4.0. The study itself has been broken down into four main topics: identifying the key issues within the CFSC; implementing a philosophy of continuous improvement within the CFSC; identifying uncertainty within the CFSC; improving and measuring the performance of the supply chain. However, as a consequence of this study two further topics were added: a discussion of some of the issues surrounding information sharing between retailers and suppliers; some of the wider issues affecting food losses and wastage (FLW) on the micro, meso and macro scales. A hybrid algorithm is developed, which incorporates the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) for qualitative issues and data envelopment analysis (DEA) for quantitative issues. The hybrid algorithm itself is a development of the internal auditing algorithm proposed by Sueyoshi et al (2009), which in turn was developed following corporate scandals such as Tyco, Enron, and WorldCom, which have led to a decline in public trust. However, the advantage of the proposed solution is that all of the key issues within the CFSC identified can be managed from a single computer terminal, whilst the risk of food contamination such as the 2013 horsemeat scandal can be avoided via improved traceability

Prevention of Waste in the Circular Economy: Analysis of Strategies and Identification of Sustainable Targets - The food waste example

This report continues and further advances the work conducted by the JRC in the field of sustainable management of food waste, which resulted in the publication of the 2015 report “Improving Sustainability and Circularity of European Food Waste Management with a Life Cycle Approach”. It focuses on the broad European waste management context and, in particular, provides insight and analysis on the sustainability of food waste prevention strategies. Among other municipal waste streams, food waste gained prominence in the political debate in light of the recent Circular Economy (CE) package. In fact, the CE Action Plan included food waste within the so-called “priority areas”, i.e. areas that should be carefully considered to strengthen the circularity of the European economy. Against this background, this report analyses and evaluates the efficacy of some selected strategies for food waste prevention implemented at Member States’ and regional levels. A streamlined ‘stakeholder analysis’ is also developed in order to identify the most relevant stakeholders along the food supply chain and analyse their influence/relation with the mechanisms that lead to food wastage. Moreover, the report presents a novel and straightforward life cycle based methodology that helps identifying sustainable targets for food waste prevention in different contexts. The analysis of food waste prevention strategies being implemented by Member States and presented in this report seems to indicate that reducing food waste generation is a very complex to achieve in practice. The key reasons for this are the complexity of the food supply chain and the fact that a variety of integrated and well-coordinated measures that involve all stakeholders along the food supply chain need to be adopted to effectively tackle the problem. Moreover, sometimes the lack of reliable and coherent data is posing a threat to the successful identification of the most appropriate measures. It is also noted that food waste prevention measures are often set without considering how their implementation will influence the sustainability performance of food waste management. On the other hand, this report stresses that the definition of food waste prevention targets should follow the definition of the desired improvement of the overall sustainability performance. Towards this goal, the methodology presented in this report tries to identify environmentally sustainable targets for food waste prevention that allows achieving a given reduction of the environmental impacts along the food supply chain.JRC.D.3-Land Resource

Simulating the Impact on the Local Economy of Alternative Management Scenarios for Natural Areas

This working paper estimates the impact on the local economy of the High Garda Natural Park of alternative management scenarios for the West Garda Regional Forest. The local economy is specialized in tourist services and strongly linked to the tourist presence and their level of expenditure. We wish to investigate the effects of the participative management strategy, which takes into account users preferences and the non-participative strategy, using the SAM multiplier analysis. The local SAM has been constructed considering three sectors: agriculture, tourism and a third aggregate sector including all the other activities. The resident population has been divided into two categories: residents employed in the tourist sector and the remaining resident population. The SAM analysis shows that the accounting representation of the local economy is meaningful and that the participative program, if chosen by the central regional management, would be the most desirable program also at the local level.Tourism, SAM, Multiplier analysis

Barriers to the innovation of the food industry in the European Union member countries

W warunkach wzrostu konkurencji, rozwoju biotechnologii i coraz większych wymagań konsumentów innowacje stają się ważnym czynnikiem konkurencyjności w przemyśle spożywczym. Celem przeprowadzonych badań była ocena barier innowacyjności przemysłu spożywczego na przykładzie wybranych krajów Unii Europejskiej w latach 2014-2016. Na podstawie badań CIS-2016 opartych na metodologii Oslo opracowanej przez OECD przeanalizowano postrzeganie barier innowacyjności w przedsiębiorstwach przemysłu spożywczego aktywnych i nieaktywnych innowacyjnie. Do oceny znaczenia analizowanych czynników w poszczególnych krajach członkowskich UE wykorzystano statystyki opisowe oraz metodę Warda należącą do aglomeracyjnych metod grupowania. Z badań wynika, że reprezentanci przedsiębiorstw aktywnych innowacyjnie częściej zgłaszali występowanie czynników utrudniających wdrażanie nowości. Do najczęściej wskazywanych przez nich wysoce istotnych barier innowacji należały: wysoka konkurencja, brak wewnętrznego finansowania i wysokie koszty. Reprezentanci przedsiębiorstw nieaktywnych innowacyjnie powszechnie wskazywali natomiast: niski popyt na rynku, brak wewnętrznego finansowania i wysokie koszty.In conditions of increased competition, development of biotechnology and the ever growing demands of the consumers, innovations are becoming an important factor of competitiveness in the food industry. The aim of the conducted research was to evaluate the barriers of innovativeness in the food industry based on chosen European Union countries during 2014-2016. Based on research of CIS-2016 carried out in accordance with the Oslo methodology developed by OECD, the barriers of innovativeness within the food industry enterprises which were active and non-active were analyzed. As for the evaluation of the analyzed factors within the countries of the EU, descriptive statistics and Ward’s method, which is an agglomeration form of grouping method, were used. From the conducted research, it followed, that the representations of innovative active enterprises more often reported on the barriers which were impeding the introduction of innovations. The most common which were reported included big competition, lack of internal funding and high costs. Representatives of inactive innovative enterprises were reporting low demand on the market, lack of internal funding and high costs

Efficiency Measurements in the Turkish Brewing Industry by Using Data Envelopment Analysis

13301甲第4473号博士（経済学）金沢大学博士論文本文Full 掲載予定あ

Improving Sustainability and Circularity of European Food Waste Management with a Life Cycle Approach

In the past years, several research initiatives have been promoted in the area of food waste. Many of these were focused on the identification of key drivers of food wastage and on the quantification of food waste generation. While these initiatives provided fairly accurate information over European food waste generation and management routes, they did not always deliver comprehensive and comparable knowledge on the sustainability of food waste management and on ways to mitigate negative consequences at environmental, economic and social levels. Building on most recent methodological advancement and policy needs, the work presented in this report aims at providing policy/decision makers and waste managers with a life-cycle based framework methodology to quantify the environmental and economic sustainability performance of European food waste management. This methodology can help identify options for improvement of such performance, thus can offer relevant insight to the decision making process. A numerical case study is also developed. This is meant to give an example of simplified application of the proposed methodology to a fictitious European waste management context. The environmental dimension has been evaluated with the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software EASETECH, while the economic assessment is conducted based on a number of different indicators expressing the costs associated with food waste management. This methodology makes use of multi-objective optimization and Pareto optimality concepts in order to help identify most sustainable management options for food waste, intended as those that minimize environmental and economic impacts. In any case, the proposed methodology is meant to only provide relevant information that can support science-based decision making. The final choice will in fact depend on a number of additional aspects that are beyond the scope of this report and also depends on the preferences of the decision maker.JRC.H.8-Sustainability Assessmen

The environmental sustainability of diets: insights from life cycle and optimisation approaches

Current diets and food production practices are causing substantial environmental degradation on a global scale. The impacts caused by food production jeopardise ecological and climate stability and contribute to the transgression of environmental limits. Meanwhile, consumption of low-quality, nutrient-poor diets worldwide lead to different forms of malnutrition. One solution that could alleviate both environmental damage and malnutrition is dietary change. Research on the sustainability of diets often employ interdisciplinary approaches which consider multiple criteria framed in wider environmental and socio-economic contexts. This thesis contributes to this body of research by advancing the application of life cycle assessment (LCA) and mathematical optimisation techniques. Insights are uncovered through three approaches which examine the environmental sustainability of dietary patterns using various methods and underlying concepts. First, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)–a linear programming (LP) method–is employed to provide a global environmental and nutritional assessment of national food supplies and gauge how efficiently food supply compositions convert environmental impacts into calories and nutrients. In the second analysis, an LP model is developed to identify nutritionally-adequate optimal diets within the environmental limits of the planet defined by the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework. Lastly, the global ecological and socio-economic externalities of national dietary patterns are estimated using a ‘true cost accounting’ method based on the monetarisation of life cycle impacts. The global assessment using DEA reveals significant scope for countries to reduce the environmental impacts from their food without also having to decrease calorie and nutrient supply, particularly upper-middle- and high-income countries. Optimising the average diet of the UK–a high-income country with environmentally unsustainable food consumption patterns–yields diet compositions which meet, or close to meeting, downscaled planetary boundaries, but may have trade-offs with affordability. Finally, the global costs of food production to health, ecosystems and resource scarcity embedded in diets are revealed to be substantial but could be significantly reduced via shifts to more plant-based diets in developed regions.Open Acces

Measuring the Contribution of Unpaid Overtime in the Gross Value Added of UK Industries: An Assessment Using Data Envelopment Analysis and Statistical Methods

This dissertation attempts to measure the contribution of unpaid overtime in relation to UK industries (SIC codes)’ economic output (Gross Value Added) for the period 2002-2012, based on data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The study provides the different theoretical approaches of unpaid labour’s definition, and more specifically those of mainstream economic approaches (eg. neoclassical) in comparison to the Marxist categories. Acknowledging that it is not always possible to construct Marxist variables with orthodox datasets, the dissertation uses the Marxist theory to attempt to explain the movement in the orthodox statistics. Unpaid overtime’s effect on the UK industries’ product (GVA) is not examined by wagebased approaches as the mainstream scholars and practitioners tend to do, but by an output-based one, using working-time as the measure of industries’ contribution. In this attempt, both parametric (Statistical regression methods) and non-parametric approaches (Data Envelopment Analysis) are used in order to account for unpaid overtime’s contribution to the UK industries product (GVA) as it is estimated by the orthodox statistics of Britain