Reduce and Re-use: Studying retailers' food waste from an Operations Research perspective

Summary

In this thesis, the aim was to analyse several interventions that could lead to a food waste reduction at the retailer. With mathematical programming methods, the following four interventions are studied: A discount for nearly expired products, a dynamic shelf life, the incorporation of substitution behaviour in the ordering process and the re-use of food leftovers at a soup kitchen. All of these interventions show to be effective to reduce food waste at the later stages of the supply chain. Moreover, a profit increase can be obtained by the retailer.