FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT (FSCM)
A curiosity that develops when the food is served on our tables ends with a proper answer of food supply chain. A food supply chain or food system mainly refers to the set of processes that describe how the food from a farm ends up on our tables. The set of processes in food supply chain include production, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal. The food we eat reaches us via food supply chains through which food moves systematically in domino-like motion from producers to consumers while the money consumers pay for food goes to people who work at various stages along the food supply chain in the reverse direction.
• Every step of the supply chain requires human and/or natural resources too.
• Because a food supply chain is domino-like, when one part of the food supply chain is affected, the whole food supply chain can be affected, which is often made apparent through changes in price.
In the food supply chain, the movement of food producer to consumer involves the set of processes like production, processing, distribution, retailing and consumption. Thus, food moves from farmer to consumer in a domino like fashion. On the other hand, among that consumers pay for food moves from consumers to producers in the reverse process, again in a domino like fashion from consumer to retailer and then to distributor and later to farmer.
In addition, both movements of food and money are facilitated by “pulls” and “pushes.” In a food supply chain, producers and processors push or supply food and consumers pull or demand food thereby facilitating the dominoes (food) to fall (move) towards the consumers. Similarly, producer sand processors pull money and consumers push money to facilitate the movement of money from consumers to producers. Thus if consumers pull for food or push for money is weak or absent, the producers’ push for food or pull for money will have to be strong in order to keep the food supply chain moving.
Food industry plays a crucial role in providing basics and necessities therefore supporting various human activities and behaviors. Once harvested or produced, the food should be stored, delivered, and retailed so that they could reach to the final customers. It was recently reported that about one-third of the produced food has been abandoned or wasted yearly (approximately 1.3 billion tons). Two-third of the wasted food (about 1 billion tons) is occurred in supply chain like harvesting, shipping and storage . For example, perishable food such as fruits and vegetables was wasted by 492 million tons worldwide in 2011 due to the ineffective and inefficient food supply chain management (FSCM). Therefore, FSCM play a major role in saving our food.
FSCM has been originated to represent the activities or operations from production, distribution, and consumption so as to maintain and keep the safety and quality of different food under efficient and effective modes. The differences of FSCM from other supply chains including the furniture logistics and supply chain management are reflected by factors like food quality, freshness and safety within the given and limited time, which would in turn make the underlying supply chain more complex and even difficult to manage. The complexities are important and play an important role, especially in the case of perishable products where their crossways or transversal time through FSCM and the use warehouses or buffers against the demand and transportation variability shall be severely limited. Apart from this, as the coordination from worldwide scale, the complexities have been compounded, thus, the focus from a single echelon such as food production was shifted to the efficiency and effectiveness of holistic supply chain. That directly or indirectly means the resources like trucks, transportation routes, warehouse facilities and workers within the FSC (food supply chain) will be efficiently used to ensure the proper food quality and safety through effective efforts which include optimization decisions.
As the development of cutting-edge technologies, FSCM has been widely and well recognized both by academicians and practitioners. Information technology (IT) has also brought some drastic and dramatic changes and improvements to FSCM in terms of automatic food processing like cleansing/ cleaning, packing and storage. However, the regulation of FSCM is still incapable in terms of addressing many practical real-life challenges. The reasons for the inadequacy are subjective to low operational levels from farmers, information problems or even problems among different stakeholders, and inefficient decision-making models/ systems.
Strategic decision-makers shall require models which are comprehensive in order to increase the total productivity and in turn profitability while the data input which are into those models are mostly ignored in most of the traditional myopic models. Therefore in order to consider the current problems or challenges, it is crucial to know the better approaches to accommodate the emerging global situations after taking an important look at the current FSCM conditions and practices.
Blog Article by Keerthana
MSc Clinical Nutrition.
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