In general, it has to be noted that most of the literature on food distribution management
does not cover the key challenges found in the food industry. Most noticeable in
the review is that there are very few studies in the literature that include food safety
aspects in distribution management.
The importance of product quality is, however, reflected to a slightly larger extent
in the current research, both in the number of contributions and in the variety of the
methodology used. A number of papers include quality changes implicitly by limiting
product storage or transportation time; other papers model quality decay explicitly by
including a cost factor or degradation parameter dependent on the distribution path
chosen or the time required.
In general, these approaches are based on only a very rough approximation of quality
degradation, which hence leads to extremely conservative quality decay parameters
and thresholds to make sure that the quality is sufficient for all products, independent
of the often varying initial quality status, the chemical and microbial properties of the
food, the environmental conditions and distribution operations. Furthermore, such an
approach often results in local operating rules such as the definition of a maximum
storage time in a DC, and hence does not permit trading off additional storage time in
a certain stage in the distribution network with, e.g., a faster delivery elsewhere in the
network, or with other means of keeping quality degradation within limits.
Most of the contributions reviewed in this paper do not specify the temperature
level during distribution, even though temperature control is a main factor with regard
to the control of food quality and food safety. The work that does specify the level
of temperature control mostly does not integrate any related quality or safety aspects
in the presented modelling approaches. A notable exception is the work on the transportation
planning level taking into account the opening of the cargo hold, acknowledging
the effects this would have on the temperature the food products are exposed
to (Ambrosino and Sciomachen 2007; Hsu et al. 2007). Rong et al. (2010) explicitly
track quality through a production and distribution network and integrate logistical decision-making with temperature control, and Van der Vorst et al. (2009) integrate
quality changes depending on time and temperature in their simulation approach.
Even though today’s society is more and more concerned with sustainability, this
review shows that there is only very limited attention to designing and operating
sustainable food distribution networks. In the few cases in which sustainability is considered,
it mainly concerns the environmental dimension of sustainability. The lack of
attention to the social dimension is likely due to the fact that it is harder to quantify.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that most of the research so far is aimed at the retail
industry, whereas the foodservice industry received much less attention. This is probably
highly related to the prevalence of SMEs in this sector, where the development
and use of the kind of decision support models described in this paper is less common
than in the larger companies found in the retail industry. However, it should also be
noted that recent developments in the retail sector, such as the increasing use of EPoS
data in ECR initiatives, are not reflected in the literature.