A Food Bank Supply Chain Model : Tackling Bottlenecks and Optimizing Investments

Food banks are initiatives that redistribute food at risk of becoming waste to people that are food insecure in middle- and high-income countries. These initiatives, which have become more prevalent in recent years, face high levels of uncertainties in their supply chain. Inspired by challenges faced by the food banks in the Netherlands, this paper describes an optimization model that can assist food bank supply chains with detecting and solving bottlenecks. We aim to determine the shortages in transport, storage and food donations and propose strategic investment decisions to tackle these problems efficiently. The optimization model prioritizes investments that will have the largest positive social impact, which we define as the numberof beneficiaries that can be served by the food banks. It furthermore deals with real-world circumstances, such as decentralized organizations, data scarcity, location-specific transport and storage capacities and strong diversity in food bank operations. Application of the model in the real-life food bank supply chain of the Netherlands has resulted in an increased capacity for serving 32% more beneficiaries