Scheduling food bank collections and deliveries to ensure food safety and improve access

Davis, Lauren B.; Sengul, Irem; Ivy, Julie S.; Brock, Luther G.; Miles, LaStella

doi:10.1016/j.seps.2014.04.001

Cited by 89 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Cost minimization and food quality are more common objectives in for-profit supply chains, while some typical objectives for nonprofit food supply chains are determining optimal food collection and distribution locations (Davis et al, 2014) and the equitable and effective distribution of food. Krejci and Beamon (2010) develop supply chain designs to address the problem of maintaining food security worldwide.…”

Section: Previous Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling for the equitable and effective distribution of donated food under capacity constraints

et al. 2015

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Mathematical models are presented and analyzed to facilitate a food bank's equitable and effective distribution of donated food among the population at risk for hunger. Typically exceeding the donated supply, demand is proportional to the poverty population within the food bank's service area. The food bank seeks to ensure a perfectly equitable distribution of food, i.e., each county in the service area should receive a food allocation that is exactly proportional to the county's demand such that no county is at a disadvantage compared to any other county. This objective often conflicts with the goal of maximizing effectiveness by minimizing the amount of undistributed food. Deterministic network-flow models are developed to minimize the amount of undistributed food while maintaining a user-specified upper bound on the absolute deviation of each county from a perfectly equitable distribution. An extension of this model identifies optimal policies for the allocation of additional receiving capacity to counties in the service area. A numerical study using data from a large North Carolina food bank illustrates the uses of the models.A probabilistic sensitivity analysis reveals the effect on the models' optimal solutions arising from uncertainty in the receiving capacities of the counties in the service area.

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Section: Previous Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling for the equitable and effective distribution of donated food under capacity constraints

et al. 2015

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“…The Feeding Americans organization coordinates over 200 food banks and 60000 distributors [7]. It depends on a wellcoordinated network of the VRP.…”

Section: A Vrp In Food Delivery Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It depends on a wellcoordinated network of the VRP. The organization uses the heuristic solution approach to create a balance between the routs and the duration spent to reach the community clients [7].…”

Section: A Vrp In Food Delivery Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also, the Good Shepherd Food Bank is an example that should be mentioned in this article. This organization is located in Maine City [7]. It relies on food donations from the emergency food rescue team, the supermarkets, and the soup kitchen.…”

Section: A Vrp In Food Delivery Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such organizations encountered many constraints like the distance between the donation, consumer, and warehouse locations in addition to limited refrigeration facilities. Therefore, the focus on distribution network topology improves the level of VRP implementation in the organization [7]. The VRP design focuses on the population density of the consumer to facilitate re-routing of the delivery to accommodate efficiency in terms of management and operation of the agency outlets.…”

Section: A Vrp In Food Delivery Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Vehicle Routing Optimization for Surplus Food in Nonprofit Organizations

Alhindi¹,

Alsaidi²,

Alasmary³

et al. 2020

IJACSA

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Non-profit organizations mitigate the problem of food insecurity by collecting surplus food from donors and delivering it to underprivileged people. In this paper, we focus on a single non-profit organization located in Makkah city (Saudi Arabia), referred to as Ekram. The current surplus food pickup/delivery and operational routing model of Ekram organization have several apparent deficiencies. First, we model the surplus pickup/delivery and operational routing model as a vehicle routing problem (VRP). Then, we optimize the pickup/delivery of different types of food groups through the different available routes. Finally, we utilize the formulated VRP problem by minimizing the total route distances. Our proposed model ensures reduction of the total time and effort necessary to send the collecting vehicles to the donors of surplus food.

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When do part‐time workers increase effectiveness? A study of food banks and the SNAP program outreach

Sharma,

Pekgün,

Öztürk

et al. 2024

J of Ops Management

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The use of part‐time employees to support operations has been a contentious topic in the literature. While part‐time employees add cost‐effective flexibility to operations, their impact on operational outcomes has largely been documented as negative. However, there are a number of sectors (e.g., non‐profit) which rely heavily on part‐time employees, with anecdotal evidence supporting their role in improving outcomes. Through this research, we seek to shed light on these contradicting perspectives. We do so by investigating the impact of the percentage of part‐time employees in the workforce dedicated to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) outreach efforts at United States (U.S.) food banks on the effectiveness of this initiative. SNAP is the largest domestic hunger program in the U.S., assisting over 42 million individuals, and food banks play a critical role in outreach and enrollment for SNAP. We utilize data on the operational characteristics and SNAP activities of food banks that are members of the Feeding America network and U.S. Census data on the demographic characteristics of their service area. We find that an increased percentage of part‐time FTEs (full‐time equivalent) in a food bank's workforce dedicated to SNAP outreach efforts increases its effectiveness, particularly in relation to operational and contextual factors that can benefit from a more flexible workforce. Based on these findings and our review of the literature, we propose a conceptual framework on the effectiveness of part‐time employees in different settings.

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Scheduling food bank collections and deliveries to ensure food safety and improve access

Cited by 89 publications

References 21 publications

Modeling for the equitable and effective distribution of donated food under capacity constraints

Modeling for the equitable and effective distribution of donated food under capacity constraints

Vehicle Routing Optimization for Surplus Food in Nonprofit Organizations

When do part‐time workers increase effectiveness? A study of food banks and the SNAP program outreach

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