Value-Chain Wide Food Waste Management: A Systematic Literature Review

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The agriculture value chain, from farm to fork, has received enormous attention because of its key role in achieving United Nations Global Challenges Goals. Food waste occurs in many different forms and at all stages of the food value chain, it has become a worldwide issue that requires urgent actions. However, the management of food waste has been traditionally segmented and in an isolated manner. This paper reviews existing work that has been done on food waste management in literature by taking a holistic approach, in order to identify the causes of food waste, food waste prevention strategies, and elicit recommendations for future work. A five step systematic literature review has been adopted for a thorough examination of the existing research on the topic and new insights have been obtained. The findings suggest that the main sources of food waste include food overproduction and surplus, food waste caused by processing, logistical inconsistencies, and households. Main food waste prevention strategies have been revealed in this paper include policy solutions, packaging solutions, date-labelling solutions, logistics solutions, changing consumers’ behaviours, and reuse and redistribution solutions. Future research directions such as using value chain models to reduce food waste and forecasting food waste have been identified in this paper. This study makes a contribution to the extant literature in the field of food waste management by discovering main causes of food waste in the value chain and eliciting prevention strategies that can be used to reduce/eliminate relevant food waste

The future of resilient supply chains

While supply chain resilience has been touched upon frequently, research remains (with the exception of often repeated anecdotal examples) relatively disparate on what disruptions actually are. This research aims to advance theoretical and managerial understandings around the management of supply chain disruptions. A two-stage research process is used which focuses first on polling academic experts. This stage is followed by the extraction of insights from practitioners in the automotive, electronics and food industries. Our findings coalesce around: (1) the types of disruptions that respondents are most concerned about; (2) the associated strategies suggested to cope with disruptions; and, (3) how resilience can be measured. It is apparent that there are some areas where academics and practitioners agree and others where they agree to a lesser extent. Both sets of actors tend to agree on how resilience can be quantified, with recovery time the preferred indicator. However, there is a discrepancy around how resilience is achieved within the supply chain. Academics emphasise the importance of redundancy while practitioners refer more to flexibility. Also, they disagree around what constitutes “key disruptions”: academics suggested high-profile events, while practitioners are more concerned with day-to-day problems

3D-Druck im Schweizer Mittelstand : aktueller Stand und Szenarien für die Zukunft

Additive Fertigung bzw. der 3D-Druck wird vielerorts immer wieder als zukunftsweisende Technologie beschrieben. Allerdings sind momentan noch zahlreiche Einschränkungen und technische Herausforderungen vorhanden. Deshalb ist diese Methode der Produktion noch nicht massentauglich. Im Zeitalter des immer schneller werdenden technologischen Wandels wird sich die additive Herstellung gemäß vielen Expertinnen und Experten jedoch in absehbarer Zeit in der Fertigungsindustrie etablieren können. Die Frage hier ist nicht, „ob“, sondern viel mehr „wann“. Damit der Schweizer Mittelstand auf diese Veränderung im Produktionsalltag vorbereitet ist, untersucht dieser Artikel den 3D-Druck-Trend im Kontext. Basierend auf einem aktuellen Forschungsprojekt, welches in der Region Alpenrhein-Bodensee-Hochrhein durchgeführt wird, soll zuerst die gegenwärtige Präsenz und Nutzung von 3D-Druck bei Schweizer KMUs dargelegt werden. Anschliessend wird ein Blick in die Zukunft gewagt. Schliesslich werden fünf mögliche Szenarien vorgestellt, die aufzeigen, wie sich die Technologie entwickeln könnte

Understanding risk management for intentional supply chain disruptions: risk detection, risk mitigation, and risk recovery

Strategies to mitigate supply chain risk tend to treat disruptive events as homogenous, despite having different causes and requiring different risk management strategies. We develop a framework to understand effective risk management strategies by considering whether a disruption was caused by an intentional or inadvertent act and whether the source of the disruption was endogenous or exogenous to the supply chain. Based on exploring evidence from risk management strategies for specific disruptions, we find that risk detection is important for both intentional and inadvertent disruptions, while effective risk management practices differ in terms of risk mitigation (relational versus process based approaches) and risk recovery (restructuring versus resilience). The resultant theory-based framework provides a new theoretical perspective on supply chain disruptions and posits that understanding intent and the source of the disruption is critical for appropriate risk management strategies