Managing Food Loss and Food Waste in the Supply Chain

The global population is expected to reach 10.5 billion by 2050. With the increase in population, food production needs to increase by at least 70% in 2050. This would require a several-fold increase in food production. However, scarcity in land availability, a falling water table, weather variability, and an increase in the cost of agricultural operations have made this difficult. The gap between food supply and demand could be minimized if food losses are reduced during production, post-harvest activities, and food waste during consumption. This dissertation focuses on food loss (FL) by growers and food-waste (FW) by households. Specifically, the dissertation first, investigates the impact of vertical coordination on FL in India. Secondly, the dissertation examines the impact of offline and online shopping on FW by American households. The FL study uses farm-level data from India and a novel estimation method in the literature. Findings show that agribusiness firms rejected a significant quantity of the product due to quality standards. The amount of produce rejected was directly impacted by labor and transportation costs. Modeling and simulating the effects of labor and transport costs show that lowering labor and transport costs for the smallholder growers would reduce FL. The FW study uses scanner data of a popular retailing chain in the United States. Using the behavior of over-purchasing of impulse products and machine learning approach, the predict the over-purchasing of impulse products across online and offline (grocery stores) channels. The study finds that households over-purchase 29% more of impulse products (danish pastries, sweet bread, and cakes) when shopping online compared to offline shopping. The dissertation provides two critical insights related to the decision-making process of growers and grocery shoppers. First, growers' decision on reducing FL is related to the quantity of produce rejected by contracting firms and selling produce in the spot markets. Second, FW is significantly related to a grocery shopper’s choice of a shopping channel and the decision on how much to purchase.