Search Results (10)

The current rising food prices, influenced by importation costs, the global food crisis, as well as pre- and post-harvest losses, have contributed majorly to malnutrition and food insecurity. Therefore, utilizing technologies that harness our indigenous agro-products as composite flours to develop functional foods will address these issues. In this study, dry raw samples of perishable and healthy yellow potato, yellow maize and pigeon pea were obtained from the agricultural development program, Edo State, Nigeria, and authenticated and processed into gluten-free fermented composite flours. The flours were profiled physicochemically and nutritionally, providing valuable insight into their multiple benefits. An experimental design software (Design Expert 13.0.) was applied to achieve optimum blended flours regarding the ratio of sweet potato–pigeon pea–maize, and mix 5 (67.70:20.00:12.31) displayed more outstanding attributes than other blends for the production of biscuits, bread and cakes using creaming and mixing methods. Various standard tests for flours and products were appropriately carried out to evaluate the proximate, techno-functional, mineral, antioxidant, anti-nutrient, sensory and color values. Individual antioxidant parameters were improved across all products compared to wheat-based products (control) under the same production conditions, showing a statistical significance at p < 0.05. A similar trend was observed in the proximate, anti-nutritional and mineral contents, while all products had a desirable color outlook. A sensory evaluation revealed the general acceptability, while an in vivo animal experimental model revealed that all animals fed with the various product samples gained weight with improved general body organs and no evidence of disease. This research underscores the potential of harnessing agri-value chain approaches in developing functional foods and promoting food security. Full article

In the operational, strategic and tactical decision-making problems of the agri-food supply chain, the perishable nature of the commodities can represent a particular complexity problem. It is, therefore, appropriate to consider decision support tools that take into account the characteristics of the products, the needs and the requirements of producers, sellers and consumers. This paper presents a green vehicle routing model for fresh agricultural product distribution and designs an adaptive hybrid nutcracker optimization algorithm (AH-NOA) based on k-means clustering to solve the problem. In the process, the AH-NOA uses the CW algorithm to increase population diversity and adds genetic operators and local search operators to enhance the global search ability for nutcracker optimization. Finally, the experimental data show that the proposed approaches effectively avoid local optima, promote population diversity and reduce total costs and carbon emission costs. Full article

The spread of COVID-19 has affected not only public health but also agriculture, raising global concerns regarding the food system. As an immediate impact of COVID-19, farmers around the globe have had difficulties with sales, resulting in large amounts of overstocked agricultural products and food loss. This further threatens the livelihood of rural, poor farmers and impacts sustainable production. To provide a better understanding of the overstocking situation after the outbreak of the pandemic, this study depicts the distribution characteristics of overstocked agricultural products in China. After analyzing a nationwide data set collected from 3482 individuals/organizations by the Chinese Agri-products Marketing Association after the outbreak of the pandemic, we found that some of the initial prevention and control measures disrupted sales channels, and in turn, caused the farmers to suffer losses. The impact was more severe in perishable products and their production areas, as well as in poverty-stricken regions. Then, we identified China’s quick and effective actions to match the supply and demand. These findings suggest that emergency responses should coordinate the relationship between emergency actions and the necessary logistics of agricultural production. To prepare for the possibility of such shock in the future, the government should take actions to clear logistics obstacles for necessary transportation, keep enhancing the fundamental infrastructure and effective mechanism of the food supply chain, and actively include innovative techniques to build a more resilient food system. Full article

Traceability, namely the ability to access information about a product and its movement across all stages of the supply chain, has been emerged as a key criterion of a product’s quality and safety. Managing fresh products, such as fruits and vegetables, is a particularly complicated task, since they are perishable with short shelf lives and are vulnerable to environmental conditions. This makes traceability of fresh produce very significant. The present study provides a brief overview of the relative literature on fresh produce traceability systems. It was concluded that the commercially available traceability systems usually neither cover the entire length of the supply chain nor rely on open and transparent interoperability standards. Therefore, a user-friendly open access traceability system is proposed for the development of an integrated solution for traceability and agro-logistics of fresh products, focusing on interoperability and data sharing. Various Internet of Things technologies are incorporated and connected to the web, while an android-based platform enables the monitoring of the quality of fruits and vegetables throughout the whole agri-food supply chain, starting from the field level to the consumer and back to the field. The applicability of the system, named AgroTRACE, is further extended to waste management, which constitutes an important aspect of a circular economy. Full article

This paper deals with dynamic industry scheduling problem in agri-food production. The decision-making study in this paper is articulated around the management of perishable products under constrained resources. The scheduling of logistics operations is considered at the operational level. Two metaheuristics are proposed to solve dynamic scheduling under perturbations. The uncertainty sources considered in this study are the expiration date of product components and production delays. The proposed Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm (ACO) take into consideration two objective functions: minimizing the makespan and reducing the number of perishable products. The algorithms are tested on a flow-shop agri-food system. Full article

Coordination of the production and distribution activities represents a significant opportunity to cut costs and limit waste in the food supply chains. In this paper, we propose two mathematical models. The first one aims to integrate the harvesting, storage, and distribution activities of an agricultural company dealing with perishable products. The second one promotes horizontal collaboration between heterogeneous agri-companies for the distribution phase, in order to achieve cost savings. Computational experiments, conducted on a set of real-life instances, confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed models, which provide multi-level support. At the tactical level, managerial insights suggest the most profitable parameter setting, in terms of harvesting frequency and quality of service. At the operational level, the use of a heuristic framework can support the decision-making of the companies, suggesting when collaboration is profitable. Full article

The management of the man–machine interaction is essential to achieve a competitive advantage among production firms and is more highlighted in the processing of agricultural products. The agricultural industry is underdeveloped and requires a transformation in technology. Advances in processing agricultural products (agri-product) are essential to achieve a smart production rate with good quality and to control waste. This research deals with modelling of a controllable production rate by a combination of the workforce and machines to minimize the total cost of production. The optimization of the carbon emission variable and management of the imperfection in processing makes the model eco-efficient. The perishability factor in the model is ignored due to the selection of a single sugar processing firm in the supply chain with a single vendor for the pragmatic application of the proposed research. A non-linear production model is developed to provide an economic benefit to the firms in terms of the minimum total cost with variable cycle time, workforce, machines, and plant production rate. A numerical experiment is performed by utilizing the data set of the agri-processing firm. A derivative free approach, i.e., algebraic approach, is utilized to find the best solution. The sensitivity analysis is performed to support the managers for the development of agricultural product supply chain management (Agri-SCM). Full article

This research analyzes the BOVESPA stock market response to the worst drought occurred in the last 100 years in Brazil. For this purpose, we conducted a standard event study analysis in order to assess the financial response to such hydrological risk on a sample of seven Brazilian agri-food firms. We found statistically significant negative cumulative average abnormal returns (CAARs) around the drought official announcement for different event windows used. Particularly, the highest impact was obtained for the narrowest temporary window, five days around the event disclosure. Moreover, we also found the drought announcement affects even more negatively those companies that sell perishable products, five out of seven in our sample, versus those selling nonperishable ones by running a two-sample t-test on CAARs. This study brings awareness to the climate change impact into the emerging financial markets and the risk faced by shareholders when investing in the agri-food sector, not only in Brazil but also in other Latin American countries, due to the increasing probability to suffer from droughts. Full article

The sustainability of agri-food products is an increasingly pressing need. It is fundamental to consider the various needs related to the factors of production and to workers, which are different from those of products and plants, as well as new requirements, such as environmental hygiene, protection from pests, and perishability control. To that purpose, this work proposes a method for in-use performance assessment (Post-Occupancy Evaluation) in food processing buildings. The method was applied to a traditional olive oil mill in Calabria. The building was thoroughly checked, and a questionnaire was given to the employees. An overall negative judgement value was recorded only for the oil storage area. The indoor thermal conditions of this area were monitored by a sensor network. The results obtained showed that the temperature in the oil storage area sometimes reached and exceeded 30 °C, while the optimal maximum temperature for the storage of extra-virgin olive oil should not go beyond 20 °C to preserve its organoleptic characteristics. To solve the problems detected, modelling and analyses were carried out with a dynamic thermal software program. A few minor building interventions were proposed and the indoor thermal values, obtained from the dynamic thermal simulation, showed a clear improvement in the building behavior in terms of protection from high temperatures, and lower energy consumption to diminish the environmental indoor temperature. Full article

The unique characteristics of perishable agri-products are a short lifespan and rapid quality deterioration. This establishes the need to significantly reduce the time from harvest to distribution. These features require reducing the processing time from harvest to distribution to being as short as possible. In this study, we focus on an integrated perishable agri-products scheduling problem that combines harvest and distribution simultaneously, with the purpose of reducing processing time and quality decay. We propose this problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming model (MINLP) to optimize the harvest time and the vehicle routing to consumers, and this MINIP is formulated as a vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). We introduce a big M method to transform the nonlinear model into a linear model, then apply CPLEX to solve the transformed model. Numerical experiments and sensitive analysis are conducted to verify the efficiency of the proposed model and to provide managerial insights. Full article