Recent advances and opportunities in sustainable food supply chain: a model-oriented review

Abstract

Faced with the challenges associated with sustainably feeding the world’s growing population, the food industry is increasingly relying on operations research (OR) techniques to achieve economic, environmental and social sustainability. It is therefore important to understand the context-specific model-oriented applications of OR techniques in the sustainable food supply chain (SFSC) domain. While existing food supply chain reviews provide an excellent basis for this process, the explicit consideration of sustainability from a model-oriented perspective along with a structured outline of relevant SFSC research techniques are missing in extant literature. We attempt to fill this gap by reviewing 83 related scientific journal publications that utilise mathematical modelling techniques to address issues in SFSC. To this end, we first identify the salient dimensions that include economic, environmental and social issues in SFSC. We then review the models and methods that use these dimensions to solve issues that arise in SFSC. We identify some of the main challenges in analytical modelling of SFSC as well as future research directions.

Keywords:

• sustainable supply chain
• food industry
• operations research
• models
• review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the French Ministries of Foreign and European Affairs and the Higher Education and Research, as well as the Chinese Ministry of Education through the Cai Yuanpei Program [grant number 34644SB] and the Xu Guangqi Program [grant number 30064QD], Humanity and Social Science Youth Research Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [grant number 16YJC790157], the Qing Lan Project, and a project funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD).