This paper considers a retailer who sells perishable fresh products directly to customers through an online channel and encounters a transportation disruption. Products shipped during the disruption period come with an uncontrollable delivery lead time, resulting in product quality degradation. To balance the compensation price provided to customers because of quality losses, the retailer might employ freshness-keeping efforts to reduce the quality loss during transportation. Therefore, it raises several fundamental questions for the retailer in mitigating the disruption. Is it always optimal to satisfy those customers who are willing to purchase during disruption? If it is profitable to fulfill orders along with an extra delivery lead time, and with a quality loss compensation, what is the optimal freshness-keeping effort? If it is preferable to deliberately create unsatisfied demand by announcing shortages (rationing) to customers, when is the optimal time to do so? To answer these questions, we first present the dynamics of post-disruption inventory and demand, taking into account the demand learning effect facilitated from negative word-of-mouth during disruption and the demand recovery after disruption ends. Afterward, we develop a model to achieve the optimal selling strategy for maximizing post-disruption profit, identifying the joint decision of the rationing period and freshness-keeping effort. Finally, by numerical analysis, three types of selling strategies are visually provided to hedge against disruptions of different lengths.

As the demand for safe food has been rapidly increasing these years, more and more stakeholders are dedicated to the safety of the food in the supply chain of this sector. To expand the market share of safe food, governments of some countries also provide subsidies to encourage food processors to invest in better food safety efforts. This paper establishes a three-stage game model between the government and a two-stage food supply chain that consists of one supplier and one processor, where the government subsidizes processors to invest in food safety efforts; furthermore, this paper determines the optimal wholesale price, marginal profit, food safety investment, and government subsidies. This paper analyzes the effects of the government subsidies and risk aversion of the food processor and introduces the mode of order quantity-based payment and demand-based payment; moreover, it also analyzes the impacts of subsidies and different payment methods on demands. The results show that suppliers can increase the market share of products by adopting the demand-based payment, but this method does not always benefit the members of the supply chain. As the processor is more risk-averse, the optimal subsidy is higher, encouraging the processor to invest in more efforts. Finally, the supplier’s profit increases with the processor’s risk aversion indicator.

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