Design of fresh food supply chain: an integrated model and case study

Despite the past and recent literature widely investigates effective strategies for the industrial supply chains design, lower attention is paid to the fresh food sector, even if it represents a high value market in which high quality and low costs are key issues to compete. Aim of this paper is to propose a linear programming cost based model to support the logistic managers and practitioners in the design of perishable food supply chains. The model goal is to define the best shipment strategies, minimizing the global supply chain cost subject to the demand and capacity constraints. Furthermore the wasted produces cost is computed and included to the model, considering produce perishability and quality decrease through the supply chain. The paper validates and applies the model through a realistic case study focusing on the fresh produce distribution in the European area. Two scenarios are investigated. The former enables different vehicles to distribute the produces, the latter considers exclusively truck as transport mode. Furthermore a sensitivity analysis compares the supply chain configurations varying the produces quality profile. The obtained results highlight that the most convenient shipment strategies depend on both the produces shelf life and their production cost. The lower the produces perishability and cost, the higher the convenience to distribute them through a multi-modal transport, e.g. truck & trail, is. For the discussed case study a reduction of the global supply chain cost of about 11% with no increase of the produces wasted occurs, comparing the multi and mono-modal scenario.