Improving Food Bank Gleaning Operations: An Application in New York State

Abstract

Gleaning is increasingly attracting the attention of food safety networks, including food banks, as a valuable tool that simultaneously reduces food loss and alleviates food insecurity. However, managing gleaning operations can be challenging because the arrival of gleaning opportunities and the attendance of gleaner volunteers are both stochastic. We develop a stochastic optimization model to characterize and optimize a gleaning operation. The food bank chooses the gleaning schedule, which affects the gleaner capacity and the number of gleaning opportunities scheduled. In a specific field study of the Food Bank of the Southern Tier in New York, we analyze the tradeoff between call and volume service levels to find the optimum schedule that maximizes the expected total volume gleaned. Moreover, we find that increasing the gleaning window and increasing slot availability can be used as substitute mechanisms for increasing the total volume gleaned. Additionally, we use our model to assess the impact of recruiting more volunteer gleaners.

Recent advances and opportunities in sustainable food supply chain: a model-oriented review

“…Orgut et al (2016) address equitable and effective distribution of donated food under capacity constraints. Sönmez et al (2016) a model to derive general operational insights and applied the model to the food bank of the Southern Tier in New York. Agricultural producers 0 0 1 1 4 6 Food processors 0 0 1 8 5 14 Distributers 0 0 0 2 9 11 Non-profit organisations 0 1 0 3 0 4 Ind./macro-ecom 10 1 1 0 8 20 Our review shows that studies on processors, distributors, as well as industry sectors are very popular while important actors in SFSC such as customers, farmers and non-profit organisations are rarely considered.…”

“…There still exist a large number of food-insecure individuals who are at risk for not being able to acquire enough food, despite increases in global food production. For instance, over 14% of household were estimated by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) in 2013 to be food-insecure in the USA, which is one of the most developed countries (Sönmez et al 2016). The cause for such dismal figures is not production shortages but the challenge to get available food to reach the needy in a timely manner due to the uneven distribution of food resources that creates wastage in some areas and food insecurity in other areas.…”

Analysis and prediction of food donation behavior for a domestic hunger relief organization

“…Phillips et al [35] develop pickup schedules from local supermarkets to quantify the benefit of recovering surplus food. Sönmez et al [36] identify the optimal number of gleaning trips to schedule during a finite planning horizon.…”

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“…Gleaning can also include collecting and donating excess food from farmers markets, packing lines, and storage houses (Beyranevand et al, 2015). Much of the literature written specifically about gleaning has focused either on how to quantitatively measure and maximize the impact of gleaning (Lee et al, 2017;Sönmez et al, 2016) or has examined the role of gleaning organizations in the communities they serve (Hoisington et al, 2001).…”

“…Food recovery and donation programs that capture food loss and distribute it to those in need have the potential to simultaneously address issues of food loss and food insecurity (Evans & Nagele, 2018;Lee, Sönmez, Gómez, & Fan, 2017;Neff, Kanter, & Vandevijvere, 2015;Sönmez, Lee, Gómez, & Fan, 2016). The practice of gleaningrecovery and distribution of unharvested produce directly from farms or the recovery of unsold produce from farmers markets-is seen as a multifunctional intervention, with the potential to address food loss, food insecurity, and the reliance of food pantries on processed food.…”