Reducing waste and achieving sustainable food security through optimizing surplus-food collection and meal distribution

Abstract

Hunger among senior citizens is emerging as a considerable global problem, but social-welfare organizations’ efforts are limited by the complexities of safely collecting surplus food and targeting it to those in need. However, these logistical problems have received scant attention in the literature, an absence that this study addresses. This study develops a logistics approach to tackling the problems of long-term care operations’ surplus food collection and meal distribution, with the wider aim of achieving sustainable food security. The analytical results reveal that hub-and-spoke meal distribution was found to have better logistics performance than direct shipment. The critical logistics behaviors associated with long-term care organizations’ meal operations were also identified. Specifically, delivery times, donor numbers, and vehicle-loading rates were found to be the essential factors in determining optimal fleet size for long-term care logistics in the sharing economy. However, the results of this study also imply that social-welfare organizations should categorize senior citizens into groups that will facilitate the identification of suitable centers for hub-and-spoke shipment. Moreover, the major decision-making parameters of the proposed approaches can be tailored to other sets of specific circumstances that necessitate surplus-food collection and meal distribution. This pioneering study scrutinizes some critical issues involved in sustainable food security and provides effective approaches for overcoming them.