Reducing food waste by retail chain supply and store management

Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF)

Food losses and waste are substantial on the global level. With the aim to achieve efficient management of food losses, it is necessary to find out the root causes, the locations of their origins, effects and efficacious activities aimed at minimising them. Food is lost throughout the whole food supply chain, however not all levels account for the same percentage of the food loss. This theme is becoming to be much bigger global problem.

This project focuses on the research of root causes, effects and treatments of losses in the retail sector as a stage of the food supply chain. Given the importance of the food retail for Croatia and Austria, we believe that mutual collaboration would gain benefits for both countries involved.

A multi-method approach will be applied for the purpose of the project, i.e., qualitative semi-structured interviews with retail store managers, quantitative data analysis, discrete event simulation models and agent based models will be developed.

The planned research study will contribute to the understanding of food waste occurrence within the context of retail and store operations in Croatia. Differences and similarities with the Austrian results will be identified. These results will contribute to develop appropriate management practices as well as to further generalization of the developed theory and methods. Special attention will be given to the identification of root causes and their interdependencies at a store format level and to decision support to prevent and/or reduce food waste along the supply chain.