Track: Sustainability in Operations and Supply Chain

Abstract

Food waste is a significant problem in modern society. It is well documented that about one-third of the food produced globally is lost or wasted, harming the firms’ economic, environmental, and social sustainability.  This problem is evident in supermarkets and restaurants, which are the most important wasters after households and agriculture. In most cases, supermarkets use new technologies to manage expiry dates, tackle food waste via implementing dynamic pricing and encourage customers to buy near-to-expired over fresher products. However, these practices are not sufficient to guarantee the achievement of sustainability. Supermarkets need to cooperate with more parties such as their counterparts (other supermarkets), restaurants, online selling platforms, fertilizer producers, and charities besides their general customers. This study introduces a framework that uses blockchain-based smart contracts to manage the cooperation between supermarkets and other parties with the goal of reducing food waste and seeking to achieve sustainable targets. A smart contract is an appealing feature of blockchain technology to facilitate and automatically execute the terms of an agreement once the specified conditions are met. We analyze the benefits that a smart contract grants to supermarkets to manage food waste in a sustainable way.

Keywords
Food Waste, Blockchain, Smart Contract, and Supermarkets.