Sustainable plant-based dietary supply chain design to reduce malnutrition in deprived areas

Abstract

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has reported that malnutrition elimination and people’s eating habits have the immense potential to alter the world food demand in 2050. Hence, strategists should incorporate the mentioned elements to properly manage the food industry. This paper aims to present a comprehensive model for integrating strategic and tactical decisions to manage a forward environmentally-friendly perishable food supply chain (FSC). Public health is applied in the form of plant-based diets to overcome nutritional deficiencies and depends on the product’s mineral features at the time of delivery. Our proposed model can be employed by the government and non-profit organizations when the salient purpose is to ameliorate the irreparable effects of malnutrition. The model can provide the food sector managers with valuable insights into designing a greener, more responsive, and more profitable supply chain. The resultant managerial insights after solving the proposed model for a real case study are 1) The importance of agricultural production to building a sustainable food system cannot be overemphasized; 2) For managers to alleviate malnutrition while minimizing costs and environmental burdens, the product's nutrient profile is of a higher priority regardless of its deteriorating speed; 3) Improving the nutritional value of processed products seems to be more effective than establishment and manufacturing costs to ensure the selection of processed products in diets; and 4) Dietary diversity can be achieved by incurring a 14% increase in total costs.