Title: Improvement of food losses and wastes in sustainable supply chain process

Authors: Ibrahim Gouda; Sharfuddin Ahmed Khan; Loai Khaldoun; Lieth Kutrub

Addresses: Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Department, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates ' Industrial Systems Engineering, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada ' Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Department, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates ' Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management Department, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Abstract: A lot of food is either lost during the supply chain process or wasted while consumption. The purpose of this paper is in two folds. Firstly, this paper identified the main factors of food losses and wastes. Secondly, the Delphi technique is used to validate these factors. After that fuzzy AHP method is applied to conduct a pairwise comparison between the stages and their factors and reach an overall ranking for them based on their impact on the whole supply chain process. Finally, a survey is conducted to validate the impact done by the two common factors of food waste that are experienced by consumers. Results shows that 60% of the food losses and waste are related to storing stage and 36% in the packaging stage. As for the storing-related factors, results shows that 89% of the food lost in the storage stage is due to insufficient storage temperature.

Keywords: food loose; food waste; food supply chain; sustainability; MCDM; DELPHI; fuzzy-AHP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIR.2025.146039

International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, 2025 Vol.37 No.1, pp.82 - 107

Received: 27 May 2022
Accepted: 13 Jun 2022
Published online: 02 May 2025 *

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