A responsive demand management framework for the minimization of waste in convenience food manufacture

Abstract

Convenience food manufacture generates considerable waste through poor planning of production. This problem is particularly acute for products that have a very short shelf life and will be disposed of as waste should their shelf life expire. Chilled ready-meals are convenience foods with relatively short shelf lives and volatile consumer demands; their manufacture is based on forecasted volumes and when demand has been over-predicted, considerable wastes are created. This is referred to as OverProduction Waste which typically sees finished product disposed of through commercial waste channels due to lack of demand. The research reported in this paper has investigated the generation of a responsive demand management framework for the reduction of overproduction wastes.

Applying Value Stream Mapping to reduce food losses and wastes in supply chains: A systematic review

“…Among those studies that included only current state mapping, four reported an associated lead time (Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006;Lehtinen and Torkko, 2005;Taylor, 2006b;Vlachos, 2015), one cycle time (Simons et al, 2003) while four studies reported none (Ahmed et al, 2015;Francis et al, 2008;Kennedy et al, 2013;Melvin and Baglee, 2008).…”

“…Kaizen), a requirement for achieving objectives in lean manufacturing, a number of additional tools were utilized either alone or in combination in various agri-food entities. Just-In-Time (JIT) or pull strategy was the most applied alongside VSM in nine studies (Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006;Folinas et al, 2015;Hossain and Uddin, 2015;Jiménez et al, 2012;Shobha and Subramanya, 2012;Tanco et al, 2013;Taylor, 2005Taylor, , 2006bVlachos, 2015) at both levels of analysis. 5S (sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain) methodology was mainly used in six studies (Engelund et al, 2009;Glover et al, 2014;Hossain and Uddin, 2015;Jiménez et al, 2012;Kennedy et al, 2013;Sathiyabama and Dasan, 2013) at a single plant level only.…”

“…Although state maps were in general graphically illustrated, two additional studies (Engelund et al, 2009;Sathiyabama and Dasan, 2013) only described the current and future states. There were six studies (Ahmed et al, 2015;Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006;Kennedy et al, 2013;Lehtinen and Torkko, 2005;Melvin and Baglee, 2008;Vlachos, 2015) that only used the current state map and one study (Noorwali, 2013) that gave a description of the current situation at a single plant level, against three studies (Francis et al, 2008;Simons et al, 2003;Taylor, 2006b) at a supply chain level.…”

“…Of the twenty four studies, nineteen applied VSM in a single agri-food plant setting, of which fifteen focused on a food processing company, producing; bread (Goriwondo et al, 2011;Sathiyabama and Dasan, 2013), ready to eat foods (Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006;Kennedy et al, 2013), peaches (Folinas et al, 2015), wine (Jiménez et al, 2012), mango juice (Hossain and Uddin, 2015), ketchup (Lehtinen and Torkko, 2005), yogurt (Melvin and Baglee, 2008), biscuit (Noorwali, 2013;Shobha and Subramanya, 2012), coffee (Parthanadee and Buddhakulsomsiri, 2014), snacks (Sa'udah et al, 2015), nougat (Tanco et al, 2013) or tea (Vlachos, 2015). Furthermore, studies on single chain members targeted the food service sector, i.e.…”

“…defects, overproduction, inappropriate processing, unnecessary inventory, unnecessary motion, transport & waiting (Hines and Rich (1997)) through the development of a current and, through the application of other lean tools, a future state value stream map (Dal Forno et al, 2014;Womack, 2006). Its success has for example been shown in its ability to improve the effectiveness of value chain analysis by enhancing consumer value at each stage (Zokaei and Simons, 2006b), boost food production and service (Ahmed et al, 2015), minimize wastes in convenience food manufacture (Darlington and Rahimifard, 2006) and improve efficiency of a food contract manufacturer (Lehtinen and Torkko, 2005). Although previous studies justify its use in various industries as a tool to curb waste, none to the best of our knowledge has explicitly explored its adaptability to FLW with a specific link to nutrient retention; yet the potential exists.…”