BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

Food quality, including safety, has been a major concern faced by the food industry, partly due to a series of food safety crises and scandals. Quality of the food products continuously changes as they move along the supply chain, which can lead to significant social, economic, and environmental consequences.

Food spoilage is one of the major issues related to food safety and quality. When food products move from farms to food processors, food retailers, and end customers, spoilage cannot be avoided. Food perishability may cause huge wastes. It is estimated by the United Nations that approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted each year. In other reports, 40% of total production was wasted. The economic loss caused by food perishability and waste reached $218 billion in the US, $143 billion in Europe, and $27 billion in Canada. In addition to the economic impacts, food perishability also caused food safety problems in many regions. According to the WHO, about 600 million people became ill after consuming contaminated food each year. Among them 420,000 died, including 125,000 children under the age of five years. This has raised serious concern about food safety in many countries.

The improvement of preservation technologies has provided many tools to reduce waste and improve safety in food supply chains. Many extensive literature reviews have been conducted on preservation and traceability technology adoptions in food supply chains. For example, Mercier et al. provided a comprehensive literature review on time-temperature management along the food supply chain. Badia-Melis et al. reviewed traceability technology adoptions in food supply chains. The adoption of various temperature control or traceability technologies allows information to be gathered to optimize inventory decisions, distribution decisions, and retail strategy even enhance safety in food supply chains.

Also, the research progress in operations management provides many opportunities for companies to reduce product waste due to decaying and to enhance food quality. Akkerman et al. reviewed the quantitative operations management research on food distribution concerning food quality, food safety, and sustainability. In this article, we mainly concentrate on the quantitative operations management models related to food quality management. The goal is to present the latest research development in this field and to identify future research opportunities.

As such, we propose the following two research questions: (1) what are the state-of-the-art development and trends in quantitative operations management research regarding food quality management? (2) What gaps exist in the current research, and what are the potential future research opportunities?

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the methodology of this research along with a descriptive analysis of the existing studies. Section 3 provides details of operations management problems and related research along the food supply chain, including storage, distribution, marketing, and traceability optimization. Section 4 is about the research implications and directions for future research. Section 5 discusses the conclusions and limitations of this review.