Supply chain structures for distributing surplus food

• Published date: 03 November 2020
• Pages: 865-883
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-10-2019-0267
• Date: 03 November 2020
• Author: Caroline Sundgren
• Subject Matter: Management science & operations,Logistics

Supply chain structures for

distributing surplus food

Caroline Sundgren

Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland

Abstract

Purpose –New actors have emerged in the food supply chain in response to the increased awareness of food

waste and the need to distribute surplus food. The purpose of this study is to analyse the different supply chain

structures that have emerged to make surplus food available to consumers.

Design/methodology/approach –This study adopts a qualitative multiple-case study of three new surplus

food actors: a surplus food platform, an online retailer and a surplus food terminal. Data sources included

interviews, documentary evidence and participatory observations.

Findings –Three different types of actor constellations in surplus food distribution have been identified: a

triad, a tetrad and a chain. Both centralised (for ambient products) and decentralised supply chain structures

(for chilled products) have emerged. The analysis identified weak links amongst new actors and surplus food

suppliers. The new actors have adopted the roles of connector, service provider and logistics service provider

and the sub-roles of mediator, auditor and consultant.

Originality/value –This paper contributes to research on closed-loop or circular supply chains for the reuse

of products in the context of surplus food distribution.

Keywords Sustainability, Reverse logistics, Case study

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

It is estimated that 88 million tonnes of food are wasted each year in the European Union at a

cost of 143 billion Euros (Stenmarck et al., 2016). Food losses and waste occur at all levels of

the supply chain (SC) (Parfitt et al., 2010). Food waste is costly, has a significant negative

impact on the environment and is unethical, considering that 118 million people in the EU live

at the risk of poverty or social exclusion (Eurostat, 2018;Matopoulos et al., 2015).

A lot of food waste could be avoided. According to a recent Canadian study, the

potential for food waste recovery is highest at the processing and manufacturing

stage, while 11.2 million tonnes, valued at $49.46 billion, is recoverable in the SC (Nikkel

et al., 2019). Furthermore, data from Italy show that 181,400 tonnes (0.4% of sales) is

recoverable surplus food (SF) in the manufacturing and retail sectors (Garrone et al.,

2014a). In recent years, scholars and practitioners have made significant efforts to identify

the underlying causes of food waste and address the problem. There is now a growing

recognition that food waste is more manageable than has previously been assumed

(Muriana, 2017).

Since the early 1990s, environmental issues in SCs have been increasingly examined

(Ansari and Kant, 2017), with related streams of research on closed-loop SCs and reverse

logistics (Guide and van Wassenhove, 2009) and, more recently, circular economy (CE)

principles in SCs (Genovese et al., 2017;Ripanti and Tjahjono, 2019). The closed-loop and

circular SC literatures are concerned with finding recovery options (such as repair, reuse,

remanufacture or recycling) to slow down and close resource flows. However, previous

SC structures

for distributing

surplus food

865

The author wishes to thank Professor 

Arni Halld

orsson and Professor David B. Grant for their helpful

comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript, and the two anonymous reviewers for

their constructive comments. The research was conducted with the financial support of the Marcus

Wallenberg Foundation, the Finnish Foundation for Economic Education, Otto A. Malm Foundation

and the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/0957-4093.htm

Received 14 October 2019

Revised 25 February 2020

15 June 2020

1 October 2020

Accepted 1 October 2020

The International Journal of

Logistics Management

Vol. 31 No. 4, 2020

pp. 865-883

© Emerald Publishing Limited

0957-4093

DOI 10.1108/IJLM-10-2019-0267

literature on closed-loop flows has tended to focus on technical products (Islam and Huda,

2018;Mishra et al., 2018), while the perishable nature of food products and the need to comply

with food safety standards pose different requirements for the duration and conditions of

storage, processing and transport (Liljestrand, 2017).

With regard to food waste in particular, SC actors tend to focus on internal waste

reduction and local optimisation, which leads to sub-optimal results for the entire SC (Mena

et al., 2014). The main reason for SF in the manufacturing and retail sector is that the internal

sell-by date has been reached (Garrone et al., 2014b), although this does not necessarily mean

that the food has reached its “end-of-life”.

Given that strategies and structures have been developed to optimise forward food SCs

(based on a linear thinking), the food SC produces waste and SF as by-products that cannot be

dealt with in a sustainable manner (Parfitt et al., 2010). However, food that risks becoming

waste can be made available to consumers through new SC structures that can provide

efficient and effective SF distribution. According to the literature, structures tend to change,

particularly when a new actor enters the network or an actor disappears and takes its

connections with it (Halinen et al., 1999).

At the sametime, actor constellationsthat facilitate closingthe loop tend to vary depending

on the recoveryoption (repair, reuse, remanufacturing, etc.) (Gobbi,2011;L€

udeke-Freund et al.,

2019). Thismeans that an effective actorconstellation for the repairrecovery option would not

immediatelyfit food recovery for humanconsumption, and actorconstellations that are ableto

provide effective SF distribution have emerged only recently. Furthermore, even though

recovery options are dependent to some degree on cooperation with other actors (such as

customers, business actors, other actorsin society), details about the roles of thesekey actors

tend to be missing in earlier literature (L€

udeke-Freund et al., 2019). Also, establishing a

cooperation thatcan enable recovery requires interactions among several actors.

Against this background, a SC approach is useful for studying the SF phenomenon. The

purpose of this paper is to analyse the different SC structures that have emerged to make SF

available for consumers. The purpose is operationalised into two research questions: Which

actor constellations and interactions have emerged in SF distribution? What are the roles of

new actors in SF distribution?

This study makes four main contributions. First, it contributes to an enhanced

understanding of food-reuse options by simplifying complex actor constellations into triadic,

tetradic and dyadic microstructures andthus adds to the closed-loop SC literature. Second, it

provides insightsinto the centralisation and decentralisation aspects of products with a high

recoveryvalue and adds to the reverseSC design literature. Third,it adds to the sustainableSC

and CE literatureby identifying the rolesof more rarely studied actorsin for-profit and not-for-

profit SCs in developing more circular SCs. Fourth, it evaluates the environmental impact of

new SC structures and thus contributes to the relatedfood waste literature.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the

relevant literature and presents the research framework. This is followed in Section 3 with an

overview of the applied research method. Section 4 describes and analyses the findings, while

Section 5 discusses the results in relation to the existing literature. Finally, Section 6

concludes the paper and suggests managerial implications, offers recommendations for

future research and outlines the study’s limitations.

2. Theoretical background

This section begins with an overview of the causes of food waste in the SC and presents the

main recovery solutions. After this, the SC structure concept is discussed in relation to reuse.

Subsequently, the conceptual framework is presented together with social network theory,

thereby providing a lens for explaining actor roles and interactions.

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