Dealing with donations: Supply chain management challenges for food banks

Abstract

Food banks redistribute food donations that would otherwise be lost for consumption by humans to people in need. As such, food banks play an important role both in addressing food insecurity for people at risk of poverty or social exclusion and in the prevention of food waste and its related environmental impacts. The efficient and effective management of food bank supply chains is a key part of reaching these important societal goals. In practice, however, the typical characteristics of food bank supply chains provide many challenges for supply chain management. In this paper, we present an overview of the key supply chain challenges in food bank supply chains based on experiences from various actors in these supply chains. Also, we review what the operations and supply chain management literature has contributed so far to addressing these challenges. Based on these challenges and the literature review, we will discuss the implications for future research. We found that important challenges related to dealing with voluntary labour, managing highly perishable products, and limited IT infrastructures have not received much attention in the literature. Furthermore, interdependencies between challenges related to supply, demand, and the matching of supply and demand require more interaction with different research disciplines.