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Report2023

D3.4 Improved Business Model For Bread Supply

Sjölund, Amanda; Bartek, Louise; Cicatiello, Clara; Mesiranta, Nina; Eriksson, Mattias

Abstract

The supplier-retailer interface is a key hotspot of food waste in the bakery sector. This is partly due to the business model including a take-back agreement (TBA) that is applied between bakeries and retailers in some countries. The TBA infers a reversed logistics to the bread value chain, which is logic in terms of efficient source separated waste management, but it restricts the incentives and possibilities for retailers to take waste reducing actions. As a consequence, it results in over-stocking of bakery products in the supermarkets to ensure high product availability at all times, risking high levels of unsold products. The bread waste is generated at the supermarkets, but since it under the terms of the TBA is owned by the bakery, the supermarket has limited mandate and interest to take actions to reduce the waste. The objective of Task 3.1 (T3.1) is to demonstrate the efficiency of new business models for bread supply without the misplaced incentive structure imposed by the TBAs, in order to reduce bread waste at the supplier-retailer interface. This is done by comparing products supplied by bakeries to the Swedish and Finnish markets where different trade agreements are used. This is the fourth deliverable of Work Package 3 (WP3) in the LOWINFOOD project. The deliverable presents the innovation of T3.1 where a model of the current Swedish bread supply chain was created to which different scenarios of alternative bread management were applied. The features of the scenarios were based on the outputs of the stakeholder dialogues previously held in Sweden, Finland and Italy as part of T3.2 of the LOWINFOOD project. A simulation of the different scenarios is used to provide insights to the bread waste reduction potential in the Swedish bread supply chain with a specific focus on the supplier-retailer interface.

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Publisher: LOWINFOOD