A systematic approach to preventing chilled-food waste at the retail outlet

The objective of this paper is to develop a systematic overview of interventions for preventing chilled-food waste at retail outlets, and to assess the impact of these interventions for a particular case of fresh-cut iceberg lettuce at a Dutch retail outlet. The structure of the simulation model as presented in this paper is generic, hence suitable for other retailers and other chilled-food products as well. The generated systematic overview focusses on interventions that do not require a system change. A distinction is made into technical, logistical and marketing interventions. Model simulations show the effectiveness of these interventions. It is concluded that a number of ‘waste drivers’ exists, such as a low and varying consumer demand, high selection behaviour, the order lead time, a fixed order unit, and a short use-by date. The retailer can fine-tune the replenishment level of his order policy and the way of rounding to the given order unit, but by doing so he is at best able to exchange waste for out-of-stock or the other way around. The systematic overview of interventions is valuable input to future research on defining and estimating the effectiveness of combining interventions, and interventions that do require a system change.</p

Verwaarding van reststromen in de biologische retail : een case-studie bij Udea/EkoPlaza

Dit is het verslag van een onderzoek naar de mogelijkheden om reststromen van het biologische retailkanaal te verwaarden. De reststromen in de biologische sector zijn in het algemeen moeilijker te organiseren dan in de reguliere sector. Dit komt doordat het volume van de reststromen relatief klein is door de beperkte omvang van de biologische sector. Aan de andere kant is een mogelijke pré dat in de biologische sector het streven naar verwaarding van reststromen eerder past binnen het profiel (van maatschappelijk verantwoord ondernemen) dan in de reguliere sector. Specifiek wordt in onderliggend onderzoek gekeken naar de reststromen van de biologische retailer Udea/EkoPlaza

On the validation of improved quality-decay models of potted plants

Storage experiments were carried out with potted plants: two Phalaenopsis cultivars and one Anthurium cultivar. The plants were stored in the dark for different storage times at different temperatures, to mimick a transport phase. Different quality aspects were scored immediately after the transport phase and after a subsequent display phase of 7 and 14 days at in-store conditions. Improved quality decay models compared to previous work were designed to quantify the effect of transport on the shelf life of potted plants. Of each cultivar, plants were obtained from two commercial growers in the Netherlands. Only the data from the first grower were used for improving the quality-decay models. The models were subsequently validated using the data from the second grower, as well as data from the first grower from year 2013 instead of 2015. So validation took place both in origin (a different grower) and in time (a different year). The validation showed that the behaviour of Anthurium ‘Arion’ was well predicted by the previously designed quality-decay models. For Phalaenopsis the performance of the quality-decay models differed per storage temperature. It was concluded that a quality-decay model first needs to be validated before it can be applied to predict the quality decay of a different production batch.</p