Adoption of ICTs in Agri-Food Logistics: Potential and Limitations for Supply Chain Sustainability

Abstract

A major challenge of Sustainable Development Goal 12 “Responsible Consumption and Production” is to reduce food losses along production and supply chains. This is particularly critical for fresh food products, due to their perishable and fragile nature, which makes the coordination of the actors all the more crucial to avoid wastes and losses. The rise of new technologies, referred to as “Industry 4.0” powered by the internet of things, big data analytics and artificial intelligence, could bring new solutions to meet these needs. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) allow for frequent exchanges of huge amounts of information between actors in the agrofood chains to coordinate their activities. The aim of the chapter is to provide a state-of-the-art analysis on ICTs used in agrofood supply chains, with a special focus on the case of fresh fruits and vegetables, to analyze the potential and weaknesses which exist in different forms of supply chains for ICTs becoming a “resource” (precious, rare, non-imitable, and nonsubstitutable) prospect and to suggest promising ICTs in this context.

Technological innovation in agri-food supply chains

“…The quality of the products decays relatively quickly, making storage and handling key elements to guarantee products' quality and minimize losses (Aramyan et al. , 2021; Vernier et al. , 2021).…”

“…Products are highly replaceable and do not go through many processing and packaging stages. The quality of the products decays relatively quickly, making storage and handling key elements to guarantee products' quality and minimize losses (Aramyan et al, 2021;Vernier et al, 2021). An example is the supply chains of fresh fruit and vegetables (apples, tomatoes, etc.).…”

The portrayal of SME leaders in Kuwait on SDG 12

“…A major challenge for those companies adopting the United Nation (UN)'s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) comes with goal 12 (SDG 12), which sets out to ensure “sustainable consumption and production patterns” (General Assembly - UNFPA, 2015). The goal demonstrates that many companies need to establish new policies to ensure sustainability by improving their technology or adopting new forms, regardless of their scale (Vernier et al ., 2021). These technologies give companies freedom to promote more environmental factors (Vial, 2019) and help them to be more transparent towards their stakeholders.…”

The Coordination of Multi-Stage Discounts in a Dual Channel Fresh Agricultural Produce Supply Chain: Minimizing the Loss of Quantity and Quality

“…In the last 20 years, the fresh agricultural produce supply chain has become a major field of study (see, for example, Clark and Hobbs, 2018 [1]; Vernier et al, 2021 [2]; Tian X et al, 2020 [3]; Walker et al, 2016 [4]). A broad range of subjects has been researched from the abstract, such as modeling (see Clark and Hobbs, 2018 [1]; Magalhães et al, 2021 [5]; Siddh et al, 2017 [6]; Xiaofeng Xu et.al., 2021 [7]), sustainability (Vernier et al, 2021 [2]), propagation (Smith, 2011) [8] and operation (Nosratabadi et al, 2020 [9]), to physical systems such as retailer behavior (N. Xu et al, 2021 [10]), pricing (C. Huang et al, 2021) [11]; Gaggero et al, 2021 [12]), risk (Walker et al, 2016 [4]), and contract (Zheng et al, 2017 [13]).…”