Minimizing Food Waste in Grocery Store Operations : Literature Review and Research Agenda

Research on food waste has attracted particular interest in recent years. This development is relevant not only to reach the aim of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations to halve food waste by 2030 but also to tackle associated problems such as the wastage of other resources and ethical concerns. Grocery retail will have a pivotal role to fulfill this goal. While reasons for food waste in retail are already well-studied, comprehensive approaches for preventing food waste in the area of store operations using analytics and modelling methods are scarce. No work has yet systematized related research. As a result, there is neither any up-to-date literature review nor any agenda for future research.We contribute with the first structured literature review of analytics and modeling methods dealing with food waste prevention in retail store operations. This work identifies cross-cutting storerelated planning issues to mitigate food waste, namely (1) assortment and shelf space planning, (2) replenishment processes, and (3) dynamic pricing policies. We introduce a common classification scheme of literature with regard to the depth of food waste integration and the characteristics of these planning problems. This builds our foundation to review analytics and modeling approaches. Current literature mainly accounts for food waste as a side-effect in cost calculations, often ignores the fact that customers exhibit age-dependent demand and is not integrated across the planning areas. Future lines of research point to the most promising open questions in this field