Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Keywords
Quality controlled logistics
·
Supply chain networks
·
Fresh produce
supply chain
Introduction
Consumers expect food in retail stores to be of good quality, to have a decent shelf
life and to be fit for purpose (Smith and Sparks
2004
). Furthermore, consumers
demand product diversity, safety, convenience (e.g. ready to eat products), and sus-
tainable food production and supply production systems. Well-informed custom-
ers are stimulating retailers and other actors in the food supply chain network to
adapt new business concepts. They require year-round availability of high-quality
fresh products (such as pine-apples, citrus fruits, kiwi fruit), which has stimulated
partners in food supply chains to pursue a coordinated approach to establish more
effective and efficient supply chains.
Design of supply chain management (SCM) has received a lot of attention in the
academic (IJOPM
2007
) as well as business world (Simchi-Levi et al.
2007
; Chopra
and Meindl
2007
; Christopher
2010
). SCM is about matching supply and demand; it
is about the integrated planning, coordination, and control of all business processes
and activities in the supply chain to deliver superior consumer value at less cost to
the supply chain (Van der Vorst and Beulens
2002
). Aim of SCM is to produce a
consistent view on how a supply chains should look like in terms of supply, produc-
tion and distribution processes and their coordination.
The design and management of AgriFood Supply Chain Networks (AFSCNs) is
characterised by a focus on product availability and its quality. The way in which
food quality is controlled and guaranteed in the supply chain is an important perfor-
mance indicator and very much linked to another performance indicator, food safety
(Luning et al.
2009
,
2011
). Investments in chain design should not therefore only
be aimed at improving logistics performance but also at the preservation of food
quality so that products are delivered with the right quality at the right time (Van
der Vorst et al.
2011
).
Typically, food degradation is related to intrinsic properties (initial microbial
contamination, respiration rate and specific cultivar characteristics), environmen-
tal conditions (temperature and humidity) and the time the product is exposed to
these conditions. Environmental conditions may be influenced by, for example, the
type of packaging, and the availability of temperature conditioned warehouses. In
food science literature, much attention is paid to food quality decay modeling and
the development of Time Temperature Indicators (TTI) to monitor the temperature
conditions and assess the impact on the quality deterioration throughout distribution
(Sloof et al.
1996
; Taoukis and Labuza
1999
; Schouten et al.
2002
; Bobelyn et al.
2006
). When we combine these food quality change models with logistics decision
support models, new opportunities arise to improve the performance of AFSCNs
(e.g. Rossi et al.
2012
).
