Research Report: Innovation among Businesses Across the Agri-Food Supply Chain during COVID-19

Innovation contributes critically to business recovery following major crises. Traditionally, business innovation is characterized by a series of choices and actions over time. During COVID-19, however, businesses throughout the agri-food supply chain were forced to innovate rapidly due to sudden unforeseen policy changes. To understand innovation induced by COVID-19, we analyze 297 usable responses from a survey of agri-food supply chain businesses in two distinct study regions (California and the two-state region of Minnesota-Wisconsin). Results indicate that larger agri-food businesses managed by younger owner-operators were more likely to innovate and adapt during the COVID-19 crisis. © 2023, Food Distribution Research Society. All rights reserved.

Of COVID-19 and Chickens: The Ethics of One Workplace Safety Policy Early in the Pandemic

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic created considerable challenges for the food supply chain. One of the industries hardest hit was the agricultural and agri-foods industry. This industry has long faced worker shortages and regularly relied on temporary foreign workers. In this case, Roosters, a chicken processing and production company in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, had just come off a very costly 12-day closure following a COVID-19 exposure risk in two of its processing plants. With the company back in operation a new safety policy has been implemented to limit future virus exposure and shutdown risks. The policy, however, targets a small group of temporary foreign workers, one of whom is challenging the lengths the company can go in the name of protecting employees from the virus and the company from losses due to closure. © 2022 Neilson Journals Publishing.

Resilient reverse logistics with blockchain technology in sustainable food supply chain management during COVID‐19

COVID‐19, which is a global problem, affects the all supply chains throughout the world. One of the supply chains most affected by COVID‐19 is food supply chains. Since the sustainable food supply chain processes are complex and vulnerable in terms of product variety, it has been negatively affected by the operational effects of COVID‐19. While the problems experienced in the supply chain processes and raw material constraints caused stops in production, the importance of new business models and production approaches came to the fore. One of the issues of increasing importance is the adoption of reverse logistics activities in sustainable food supply chains and increasing the resilience of food supply chains by integrating blockchain technology into processes. However, adapting blockchain technology to increase the resilience of reverse logistics activities in the food supply chain has advantages as well as risks that need to be considered. Therefore, it is aimed to determine these risks by using fuzzy synthetic evaluation method for eliminating the risks of blockchain adaptation for flexible reverse logistics in food supply chains to increase resiliency. The novelty of this study is that besides discussing about the benefits of BC‐T, it is to identify the risks it can create, to eliminate these risks and to guide the establishment of resilience in reverse logistics activities of SFSCs. According to results, the risks with the highest value among the subrisks are determined as data security risks. Data management risks are calculated as the risk with the highest value.

Post pandemic strategic planning of food catering production and distribution networks: A regional case study

Due to the Covid19 outbreak, the food catering industry faces disruption of demand traits and great uncertainty about the future development of market segmentation. The need for a re-design of production and logistic networks faces the lack of knowledge about cost drivers, rendering the application of mathematical optimization models challenging. In this paper, a cost components analysis is carried out to quantify each cost item's impact on the full meal cost. Cost analysis aims to formalize the relationship between meal cost and parameters such as productivity, meal conservation regime, customer typology, portioning method, and customer-plant distance. The cost parameters are adjusted through empirically driven correction factors to include operational and management complexities that would otherwise be neglected. The obtained parameters feed a total cost minimization model for a productive and distributive catering network. The location-allocation model chooses the production capacity to activate in each production plant for every meal-type and achieves the customer-production plant pairing. The framework is applied in an Italian regional case study to compare the BAU scenario to two different To-Be scenarios. The As-Is scenario considers four different production facilities serving the pre-pandemic demand of 2019, while the To-Be scenarios are based upon a demand forecast enforcing a more resilient network. The analysis shows how re-designing production and distribution networks enables meeting uncertain demand while keeping FMCs under control within a regional environment. © 2022 The Authors.

A review on post-COVID-19 impacts and opportunities of agri-food supply chain in Malaysia.

Background: Malaysia is strongly supported by the agriculture sector as the backbone to drive the economy. However, COVID-19 has significantly affected agriculture across the production, supply, and marketing chains. It also disturbs the balance of food supply and demand in Malaysia. COVID-19 was an unexpected pandemic that resulted in shock and panic and caused a huge global impact. However, the impacts of this pandemic on the agriculture sector in Malaysia, particularly in the production and supply chains, are still unclear and scarce. This review offers insights into the challenges, particularly in sustaining agri-food production and supply chains. It also highlights the opportunity and relevant measures towards sustainability in agriculture to avoid agri-food disasters in the future. Methods: This study was carried out through a desk review of the secondary source of information covering the impact of COVID-19 in Malaysia particularly in the agri-food aspect, and a wide range of strategies and initiatives as the effective measures to overcome the crisis of this pandemic. Online desk research of the government published data and customer desk research were utilized to complete this study. Search engines such as Google Scholar and the statistical data from the official websites including the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) and the Food and Fertilizer Technology Center for the Asian and Pacific Region (FFTC-AP), were utilized. Keywords such as impact of COVID-19, pandemic, and agri-food supply chain were used to conduct the searches. The articles identified to be related to the study's objective were then downloaded and included in the study. Descriptive methods were used as the primary analysis technique following the descriptive analysis and visual data analysis in performing the sources obtained. Results: This devastating impact damages the lives by causing 4.3 million confirmed infections and more than 290,000 deaths. This disease presents an unprecedented challenge to the public health. The lockdown restriction under the movement control order (MCO), for more than of the world's population in the year 2020 to control the virus from spreading, has disrupted most of the economic sectors. The agriculture industry was seen as one of the essential industries and allowed to operate under strict standard operating procedures (SOP). Working under strict regulations came with a huge price paid for almost all industries. Conclusion: This pandemic has affected the national agri-food availability and accessibility in Malaysia. This outbreak created a reflection of opportunity for sharing a more flexible approaches in handling emergencies on agricultural food production and supply chains. Therefore, the government should be ready with the roadmap and enforce the measures to control the pandemic without disrupting the agri-food supply chain in the near future.

Robust optimization and strategic analysis for agri-food supply chain under pandemic crisis: Case study from an emerging economy.

Pandemic crises like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have severely influenced companies working in the Agri-food industry in different countries. Some companies could overcome this crisis by their elite managers, while many experienced massive financial losses due to a lack of the appropriate strategic planning. On the other hand, governments sought to provide food security to the people during the pandemic crisis, putting extreme pressure on companies operating in this field. Therefore, the aim of this study is to develop a model of the canned food supply chain under uncertain conditions in order to analyze it strategically during the COVID-19 pandemic. The problem uncertainty is addressed using robust optimization, and also the necessity of using a robust optimization approach compared to the nominal approach to the problem is indicated. Finally, to face the COVID-19 pandemic, after determining the strategies for the canned food supply chain, by solving a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, the best strategy is specified considering the criteria of the company under study and its equivalent values are presented ​​as optimal values of a mathematical model of canned food supply chain network. The results demonstrated that "expanding the export of canned food to neighboring countries with economic justification" was the best strategy for the company under study during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the quantitative results, implementing this strategy reduced by 8.03% supply chain costs and increased by 3.65% the human resources employed. Finally, the utilization of available vehicle capacity was 96%, and the utilization of available production throughput was 75.8% when using this strategy.