According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, one‐quarter to one‐third of all the food produced worldwide is wasted. We develop a simple framework to systematically think about food waste based on the life cycle of a typical food item. Based on our framework, we identify problems with extant measures of food waste and propose a more consistent and practical approach. In so doing, we first show that the widely cited, extant measures of the quantity and value of food waste are inconsistent with one another and overstate the problem of food waste. By misdirecting and misallocating some of the resources that are currently put into food waste reduction efforts, this overstatement of the problem could have severe consequences for public policy. Our framework then allows documenting the points of intervention for policies aimed at reducing the extent of food waste in the life cycle of food and the identification of interdependencies between potential policy levers.

International Food and Agribusiness Management Review 4 (2001) 149-166. doi:10.1016/S1096-7508(01)00079-92016-03-04T18:49:26

Supply chains are increasingly asked by consumers, policy makers, and other stakeholders to deliver product attributes that range far beyond the experience and search attributes of classical consumer demand. One name given these attributes is credence attributes (e.g. place-of-origin, organic, locally-grown). Sustainability as an attribute is an interesting emerging case. Sustainability is an example of a 'wicked problem': complex, ill-defined, messy and unsolvable in any traditional sense. Sustainability's lack of tractability raises the interesting question as to how a supply chain or network produces a thing that is beyond conventional notions of definition and structure. The paper develops a general framework for linking supply chain performance to types of knowledge and supply chain governance. The framework draws from knowledge management theory, the resource based theory of the firm, and transactions cost economics. Various types of knowledge are argued to have different levels of strategic value – explicit knowledge has limited strategic value, tacit knowledge has moderate strategic value, and new knowledge has high strategic value. Managing wicked problems requires a type of supply chain governance that creates new knowledge in the context of a broad stakeholder network. This type of governance is called transformational and is contrasted with exchange governance and learning governance. Once developed, the framework is applied to the wicked problem of sustainability, including a case study on one empirical structure being used to manage it. For supply chains and networks, future economic value is likely to demand delivery of more and more complex attributes that will take businesses increasingly into the realm of wicked problems.

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