SEMINAR:Food waste and ugly veg supply chains

Guest: Güven Demirel, Queen Mary University of London

Title: Food waste and ugly veg supply chains (IE, DSA)

Date/Time: December 25, 2024, 13:40

Location: FENS G035

Abstract: The tradition of marketing only aesthetically agreeable produce by retailers contributes to a major source of food waste and loss through “ugly veg”, i.e., produce that does not look “regular”. We study the impact of marketing ugly veg on food loss by comparing scenarios of a traditional supply chain without ugly veg, an ugly veg supply chain with a single retailer offering both regular produce and ugly veg, and a two-retailer supply chain where an auxiliary retailer sells the ugly veg. We characterize the equilibrium decisions in these systems and assess the effectiveness of different supply chain designs. We demonstrate the conditions under which the supply chain can reduce overall food loss. For sufficiently high cost of effort, selling ugly veg through a single retailer reduces food loss. Nonetheless, the grower is generally better off offering the ugly veg to an auxiliary retailer. We show that the ratio of food loss per cultivated land always decreases in the two-retailer supply chain, while the total food loss might increase for sufficiently high cost of effort. We then compare wholecrop contracts, an emerging retailer - farming contract type, and demonstrate its contribution to the participation of farmers and general reduction of food waste.

Bio: Dr. Güven Demirel is Reader (Associate Professor) in Supply Chain Management at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). He holds a PhD in Physics (network science) from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany and he worked at the Nottingham University Business School and Essex Business School, before joining QMUL. Guven conducts interdisciplinary research on complex systems, investigating the structure, dynamics, resilience, and sustainability of supply and international business networks; the effectiveness of supplier management programs; innovation in supply networks; food waste in agrifood supply chains; and co-evolution of networks. He uses methods from network science, operations research, statistics, and game theory in his research. His work has appeared in prestigious journals, including Science, Journal of Operations Management, and European Journal of Operational Research. He currently holds a position as Expert Secondee at the Government Office for Science, United Kingdom, working on the future of global supply chains.