Assessment of key sustainability indicators in a UK fast food supply chain: a life cycle perspective

The purpose of this article is to investigate the understanding of businesses and end consumers of key sustainability measures in the UK fast food Supply Chain. A quantitative method was used in which two sets of well-structured questionnaires were designed separately for fast food businesses and end consumers. The data analysis was conducted through “cluster analysis”. It was found that social responsibility was scored as the most important fast food sustainability concern for businesses, whilst the end consumers were found to be more concern about environmental impact of fast food industry. However, no statistical difference was found between fast food businesses and end consumer views. This research was carried out in north of England, where may have different proportion of cultural, social and economical diversity. The collected data from fast food businesses was also not scattered evenly, as there were more responds from smaller fast food firms than food manufacturers and processers. More research attention is needed in this field in which there are various issues and challenges to promote a lean and green food supply chain. This research could partly investigate these challenges including the different trade-offs between social, environmental and economic measures of sustainability in a specific food supply chain. This article conducts a research investigation in three dimensional sustainability of fast food supply chain, which includes all types of businesses in this sector to investigate the differences between end consumers and businesses to promote lean and green fast food supply chain

Mitigating Food Supply Chain Disruptions Amid Covid-19

Pesan Utama - Untuk mencegah penyebaran wabah, banyak wilayah di Indonesia memberlakukan Pembatasan Sosial Berskala Besar (PSBB) dengan berbagai tingkat pembatasan pergerakan orang dan barang. - Minimnya kejelasan pembatasan di ranah industri dan transportasi di masa PSBB berisiko menciptakan gangguan pasok dan keterlambatan distribusi yang dapat berakhir pada kelangkaan dan kenaikan harga-harga. Kondisi tersebut kemudian juga diperumit dengan adanya pemberlakukan upaya-upaya lainnya oleh pemerintah daerah ketika mengumumkan PSBB di wilayah mereka. - Pihak berwenang harus memastikan bahwa seluruh rantai pasok pangan tetap aktif dan tidak terganggu. Kementerian Perindustrian (Kemenperin) sebaiknya mengeluarkan izin kepada semua sektor yang terlibat dalam rantai pasok pangan dan Kementerian Perhubungan (Kemenhub) sebaiknya memperbolehkan izin-izin tersebut untuk diverifikasi dengan cepat pada titik-titik pemeriksaan. Kementerian Badan Usaha Milik Negara (Kementerian BUMN) sebaiknya mengarahkan perusahaan surveyornya untuk meningkatkan kapasitas survey di pelabuhan-pelabuhan. - Kemenperin, Kemenhub, dan pemerintah daerah harus memastikan protokol kesehatan ditaati oleh semua industri dan penyedia jasa transportasi dengan menjabarkan sanksi dan melakukan pemeriksaan secara acak. - Pemerintah daerah harus mencegah penyebaran wabah dengan memastikan gangguan paling minimum terhadap pasok pangan.Key Messages - To contain the outbreak, many regions in Indonesia have implemented Large Scale Social Restriction (Pembatasan Sosial Berskala Besar/ PSBB) with varying degrees of restrictions on the movements of people and goods. - Lack of clarity in industry and transportation restrictions during PSBB risks creating supply disruptions and distribution delays that can result in shortages and inflate prices. This is exacerbated by measures imposed by local governments when declaring PSBB in their areas. - Authorities should ensure that the entire food supply chain remains active and unhindered. The Ministry of Industry (MOI) should issue permits to all sectors involved in the food supply chain and the Ministry of Transportation (MOT) should allow for these permits to be used for quick verification at checkpoints. The Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises (MSOE) should direct its surveying firms to increase surveying capacity at ports. - MOI, MOT, and local governments should ensure that health protocols are adhered to by industries and transportation providers by clearly specifying sanctions and conducting random checks. - Local governments should contain the outbreak with minimal disruption to the food supply

The current situation of EU’s food chain

The sharp fluctuations in agricultural commodity and food prices at a time of great uncertainty about the economic outlook illustrate the need to improve the functioning of the European food supply chain with a view to enhancing its efficiency and competitiveness. Better regulation and ensuring a vigorous and coherent enforcement of competition and consumer protection rules will contribute to limiting price increases for the benefit of European consumers, in particular lower income households. Moreover, it will also help overcome the present fragmentation of the food supply chain and remove artificial entry barriers for producers, which will help European consumers benefit from the widest possible choice of quality food products. Additionally, this could help rebalancing the bargaining power in the food supply chain. Global demand and supply developments have been one of the main determinants of the rapid increase in food prices observed. Nevertheless, problems in the functioning of the food supply chain, either in terms of the degree of competition or concerning regulation may have played an important role as well. In the present economic conditions, it is therefore particularly important to analyse how to improve the functioning of the food supply chain and, in particular, to better understand the transmission mechanisms linking commodity prices with producer and consumer prices. This would help identify appropriate measures in support of the consumer's purchasing power and the competitiveness of the sectors involved. The food supply chain connects three economically important sectors: the agricultural sector, the food processing industry and the distribution sectors. These sectors account for 6% of EU value added and 12% of EU employment. As the food processing industry and the distribution sectors have many interactions with other sectors, market malfunctioning along the food supply chain can have significant repercussions. The slow productivity growth in these sectors in comparison with the US indicates that there is room for efficiency improvements.food chain, demand and supply, retirements, consumer, foodstuff’s price, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Life Cycle Assessment across the Food Supply Chain

The environmental impact is one of the major pillars of concerns when addressing the sustainability of food production and sustainable food consumption strategies. To assess to what extent food production affects the environment, one needs to choose a proper environmental assessment tool. Different types of assessment tools have been developed to establish environmental indicators, which can be used to determine the environmental impact of livestock production systems or agricultural products. The environmen¬tal assessment tools can be divided into the area based or product based (Halberg et al., 2005). Area-based indicators are, for example, nitrate leached per hectare from a pig farm, and product-based indicators are, for example, global warming potential per kg pork (Dalgaard, 2007). The area-based indicators are useful for evaluating farm emissions of nutrients such as nitrate that has an effect on the local environment. On the other hand, when considering the greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural production, the product-based indicators are useful for evaluating the impact of food productions on the global environment (e. g., climate change) and have the advantage that in addition to emis-sions from the farms, emissions related to the production of input s (e.g., soybean and artificial fertilizer) and outputs (e.g., slurry exported to other farms) are also included. In that way it is easier to avoid pollution swapping, which means that the solving of one pollution problem creates a new (Dalgaard, 2007)

The Economic Performance of Food-Manufacturing Industries in Idaho

As part of the global economy, agriculture and agribusiness of the State of Idaho have been significantly affected by the structural changes taking place in the food-supply chain. Constantly changing consumer preferences, new technologies, and globalization represent both challenges and opportunities for the food-supply-chain participants. The very diverse agriculture of Idaho provides a favorable market environment for agricultural producers and food companies to become involved in various food-manufacturing activities. This paper focuses on the quantitative evaluation of the economic performance of food-manufacturing industries in Idaho, using U.S. Economic Census data for 1997 and 2002. The results have implications for the strategic decision-making of the food-supply-chain participants and government authorities.Agribusiness,

TRACEABILITY, TRADE AND COOL: LESSONS FROM THE EU MEAT AND POULTRY INDUSTRY

The traditional food supply chain is arranged as a complex array of producers, handlers, processors, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. As the food supply chain grew in complexity over time, little emphasis was placed on reserving information regarding the origin of raw materials and their transformation, often by multiple handlers, into consumer ready products. This paper provides case illustrations of the implementation of information systems for support of traceability in Europe. Emphasis is on the firm level costs and benefits as well as the broader market structure and governance issues inherent in information economics of the firm.traceability, economics of the firm, information systems, internet, food supply chain, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, International Relations/Trade, Livestock Production/Industries,

Critical control points along the organic food supply chain

Within the framework of “Organic HACCP” a systematic analysis was carried out among selected certified organic food production chains (wheat bread, cabbage, tomatoes, apples, wine, eggs, milk) to investigate current procedures of production management and quality assurance related to the chains. Relevant critical control points (CCPs) were accordingly assessed for the single management steps of production, wholesale, processing, transport and retail. Therefore, a questionnaire was set up by experts knowledgeable in the areas of seven quality and safety criteria such as microbial toxins and abiotic contaminants, nutrient content and food additives, pathogens, freshness and taste, natural plant toxicants, fraud, social and ethical aspects. Questions were formulated with regard to the areas of consumer concerns. A database was established to carry out the analysis of collected data representing several regions typical for the selected commodity and to overview the management steps and their critical control points. The database contains information on i) the background of the CCPs, ii) the quantitative risk related to other chains in the analysis or, if relevant, compared with data from other studies, iii) how and why the step is controlled in the chain or suggestions of means for improved control and, iv) discussions in relation to the differences between the chains. Possibilities which may alleviate the problem at a later stage, if relevant, are also included. The lecture will highlight examples of critical control points along organic food chains

Risk Mitigating Strategies in the Food Supply Chain

Food safety events in the recent past have generated significant media attention and resulted in increased concerns over the food on the plate. A recent study (Degeneffe et al., 2007) on consumer perceptions of bio-terrorism and food safety risks shows increasing concern over food safety and corresponding decreasing confidence in security of the U.S. food supply. While there are some mandated safety and security practices for the firms in the food supply chain the economic incentives for the firms to actively address food safety throughout the supply chain are less clear. Security practices often require significant investments in both within the firm and across the supply chain but do not show tangible returns. Also, higher investments in securing the firms’ processes and products do not necessarily make the food products more safe if the supply chain partners exhibit higher risks. However, a risk that is realized can potentially bankrupt the firm. Some high-profile cases of food safety outbreaks have had substantial economic consequences such as, lost sales, recall and compensation costs, damaged goodwill and hence impact on future markets. Such incidents can lead the firms out of business and the impact is not contained just at the firm level but also felt throughout the food supply chain. The issues of economic incentives and disincentives for risk mitigation strategies and investments, in a highly vulnerable area such as food sector, are an emerging area of concern both in private and public sector management as well as academic research. The research questions of interest that this paper addresses are: How much should the firm invest to address the security and safety risks that it faces? The optimum investment levels, among other things, are a function of the probabilities of contamination levels exceeding the maximum acceptable standards set. We consider a specification for the contamination levels follow gamma distribution as it exhibits the fat tail property which suggests that extreme events are more likely than predicted by the normal Gaussian form. Previous work by Mohtadi and Murshid(2007) has highlighted the fat-tail nature of extreme events for chemical, biological and radionuclear (CBRn) attacks, which are of intentional nature. However, for food safety risks of unintentional nature the fat-tail nature of the distribution though suggested, is not yet established in literature. The present model leaves less scope for analytical solutions but lends itself to numerical methods, which we employ to examine the firm strategies. Our preliminary model and its analysis suggest that infact for very low levels of risk exposure no investment in security is required! However, as the standards loosen and risk increases the optimum amount of investments also increase. Though the result here are intuitively consistent, they are largely dependent on the parametric specification of the model and their sensitivity to the parameter values is yet to be tested.Agribusiness, Risk and Uncertainty, L100, L800,

Energy Uncertainty: Implications for the Food Supply Chain

Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,