Reducing food waste through lean and sustainable operations: A case study from the poultry industry

Abstract

The growing need for solving the problem of food waste for tackling the survival of the planet and humankind is encouraging researchers to seek sustainable operations that alter the conventional methods that are currently in use in the food industry. Lean thinking has been used in this study to propose sustainable operations that incorporate social, economic, and environmental aspects and to handle the multidisciplinary and complex nature of reducing food waste. The value stream mapping methodology has been employed to explain food waste and generate drivers and to observe the end-to-end system flow. Since most of the waste is observed in upstream operations in emerging economies, one of the biggest meat-processing companies in Turkey is studied for illustrating the proposed methodology. As a result of the model, lean and sustainable food operations are suggested considering social, economic and environmental aspects.

Keywords

• lean management
• sustainability
• food waste
• value stream mapping
• emerging economy