scholarly journals Spatial Coupling Between Specialized Production of Fruits and Vegetables and Front-End Cold-Chain Logistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Hong Li ◽  
Ting Wu ◽  
Juan Ran ◽  
Jijuan Zhan ◽  
Yongtao Zhu
Author(s):  
Saurav Negi ◽  
Neeraj Anand

India, the world's second-largest producer and one of the centers of origin of Fruits and Vegetables is also one of the biggest food wasters in the world. The challenge of feeding India's billion plus people is not really about agriculture and food production but getting the quality food to the concerned people in a right time. The biggest contributors to this waste are lack of temperature controlled transport and inadequate quality of cold storage facilities for both Farmers and Food sellers i.e. retailers. What India lacks, and needs, is a well-developed, world-class cold chain infrastructure. Without it, India's problems are vast and likely to grow. In this chapter, the authors tries to outlines the extent of Fruits and Vegetables waste in India (at various stages from farm to retail) and its ramifications on food production and safety. Authors also highlighted the challenges faced by cold chain sector in India and a roadmap for improvements. As Indian economy is based on agriculture, development of Cold Chain infrastructure from farm to retail points will play a crucial role.


Author(s):  
Swapnil Saurav ◽  
Ravi Potti

Cold Chain refers to the transportation of temperature sensitive products like perishable goods from the point of origin to point of consumption in the food supply chain, which keeps it fresh and edible for a much longer period than in normal conditions. Cold Chain helps in transporting seasonal products and also making it available throughout the year. Two main parts of cold chain are transportation and storage systems. The key Indian industries where cold chain logistics play very important role are fruits and vegetables, milk and milk products (ice cream), Poultry and processed meat, marine products, pharmaceutical (mainly vaccines) and chemicals. An efficient cold chain industry ensures availability of food products as well as prevents spoilage of medicines. Country like India, where infrastructure is one of the major challenges, cold chain plays a critical role. Analysis for this study shows that cold supply chain network does not differ significantly from products to products at least in Indian scenario. Some of the challenges to the growth of sector in India are high energy cost, power deficit, rising real estate cost, lack of logistical support and uneven distribution of capacity. All these challenges bring down the operating margin of a company and makes it not so attractive business sector. But during last couple of years there is a positive environment being created for this sector in India. The growth in organized retail, growing interest in horticultural crops, demand for cold chain logistics from Pharmaceutical industry and various initiatives by government are some of the reasons why there is a renewed interest in this sector especially by private sector players. This study, which is focused on Indian cold chain logistics, analyzes the industry on PEST (Political, Economy, Social and Technology) model and presents top 3 factors on each of these 4 parameters.


Processes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 1431
Author(s):  
Daniel I. Onwude ◽  
Guangnan Chen ◽  
Nnanna Eke-emezie ◽  
Abraham Kabutey ◽  
Alfadhl Yahya Khaled ◽  
...  

Fruits and vegetables are highly nutritious agricultural produce with tremendous human health benefits. They are also highly perishable and as such are easily susceptible to spoilage, leading to a reduction in quality attributes and induced food loss. Cold chain technologies have over the years been employed to reduce the quality loss of fruits and vegetables from farm to fork. However, a high amount of losses (≈50%) still occur during the packaging, pre-cooling, transportation, and storage of these fresh agricultural produce. This study highlights the current state-of-the-art of various advanced tools employed to reducing the quality loss of fruits and vegetables during the packaging, storage, and transportation cold chain operations, including the application of imaging technology, spectroscopy, multi-sensors, electronic nose, radio frequency identification, printed sensors, acoustic impulse response, and mathematical models. It is shown that computer vision, hyperspectral imaging, multispectral imaging, spectroscopy, X-ray imaging, and mathematical models are well established in monitoring and optimizing process parameters that affect food quality attributes during cold chain operations. We also identified the Internet of Things (IoT) and virtual representation models of a particular fresh produce (digital twins) as emerging technologies that can help monitor and control the uncharted quality evolution during its postharvest life. These advances can help diagnose and take measures against potential problems affecting the quality of fresh produce in the supply chains. Plausible future pathways to further develop these emerging technologies and help in the significant reduction of food losses in the supply chain of fresh produce are discussed. Future research should be directed towards integrating IoT and digital twins for multiple shipments in order to intensify real-time monitoring of the cold chain environmental conditions, and the eventual optimization of the postharvest supply chains. This study gives promising insight towards the use of advanced technologies in reducing losses in the postharvest supply chain of fruits and vegetables.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aman Bhatnagar ◽  
Prem Vrat ◽  
Ravi Shankar

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine compatibility groups of different fruits and vegetables that can be stored and transported together based upon their requirements for temperature, relative humidity, odour and ethylene production. Pre-cooling which is necessary to prepare the commodity for subsequent shipping and safe storage is also discussed. Design/methodology/approach The methodology used in this journal is an attempt to form clusters/groups of storing together 43 identified fruits and vegetables based on four important parameters, namely, temperature, relative humidity, odour and ethylene production. An agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm is used to build a cluster hierarchy that is commonly displayed as a tree diagram called dendrogram. The same is further analyzed using K-means clustering to find clusters of comparable spatial extent. The results obtained from the analytics are compared with the available data of grouping fruits and vegetables. Findings This study investigates the usefulness and efficacy of the proposed clustering approach for storage and transportation of different fruits and vegetables that will eventually save huge investment made in terms of developing infrastructure components and energy consumption. This will enable the investors to adopt it for using the space more effectively and also reducing food wastage. Research limitations/implications Due to limited research and development (R&D) data pertaining to storage parameters of different fruits and vegetables on the basis of temperature, relative humidity, ethylene production/sensitivity, odour and pre-cooling, information from different available sources have been utilized. India needs to develop its own crop specific R&D data, since the conditions for soil, water and environment vary when compared to other countries. Due to the limited availability of the research data, various multi-criteria approaches used in other areas have been applied to this paper. Future studies might be interested in considering other relevant variables depending upon R&D and data availability. Practical implications With the increase in population, the demand for food is also increasing. To meet such growing demand and provide quality and nutritional food, it is important to have a clear methodology in terms of compatibility grouping for utilizing the available storage space for multi-commodity produce and during transportation. The methodology used shall enable the practitioners to understand the importance of temperature, humidity, odour and ethylene sensitivity for storage and transportation of perishables. Social implications This approach shall be useful for decision making by farmers, Farmer Producer Organization, cold-storage owners, practicing managers, policy makers and researchers in the areas of cold-chain management and will provide an opportunity to use the available space in the cold storage for storing different fruits and vegetables, thereby facilitating optimum use of infrastructure and resources. This will enable the investors to utilize the space more effectively and also reduce food wastage. It shall also facilitate organizations to manage their logistic activities to gain competitive advantage. Originality/value The proposed model would help decision makers to resolve the issues related to the selection of storing different perishable commodities together. From the secondary research, not much research papers have been found where such a multi-criteria clustering approach has been applied for the storage of fruits and vegetables incorporating four important parameters relevant for storage and transportation.


Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 719
Author(s):  
Bernardo Pace ◽  
Maria Cefola

The preservation of the freshness of fruits and vegetables until their consumption is the aim of many research activities. Quality losses of fresh fruit and vegetables during cold chain are frequently attributable to an inappropriate use of postharvest technologies. Moreover, especially when fresh produce is transported to distant markets, it is necessary to adopt proper postharvest preservation technologies in order to preserve the initial quality and limit microbial decay. Nowadays, for each step of supply chain (packing house, cold storage rooms, precooling center, refrigerate transport and distribution), are available innovative preservation technologies that, alone or in combination, could improve the fresh products in order to maintain the principal quality and nutritional characteristics. The issue groups five original studies and two comprehensive reviews within the topic of preservation technologies related to innovative packaging and postharvest operation and treatments, highlighting their effect on quality keeping.


Author(s):  
Saurav Negi ◽  
Neeraj Anand

Fruits & vegetables (F&V) crops being high value crops are important in raising the incomes of the farmers besides creating employment opportunities. Fruits and vegetables sector in India has gained its credibility for providing sustainable income, nutritional security and for providing employment opportunities, both in rural and urban areas. India is the second largest food producer in the world, after china and one of the centers of origin of fruits and vegetables with the total production. Various high temperate fruits and vegetables like apples, oranges, pears, peaches, litchis, plums, tomato, green leafy vegetables etc. are widely grown in Himalayas and tarai region of Uttarakhand and are important to the large food processing industry. Fruits and vegetables is one of the most significant and thrust sector of the economy of Uttarakhand state. The entire supply chain of fruits and vegetables in Uttarakhand is laden with the various issues which resulting to poor price realization of growers on one hand and exorbitant prices paid by consumers on the other. Highly inefficient supply chain and cold chain infrastructure is the major impediment in the path of speedy growth of F&V production sector in Uttarakhand. The present study undertakes a thorough review of basic and contemporary literature available and discussed the issues and challenges related to supply chain of fruits and vegetables sector in state of Uttarakhand, India and suggested the corresponding mitigation strategies. As Uttarakhand economy is based on agriculture, there is a need to develop efficient supply chain which may play an important role in increasing the shelf life of the F&V and in turn reduce the losses and wastage in fruits and vegetables, increase in farmer income, generate employments opportunities for the local peoples, and improve the livelihood of the farmers which leads to the development of Uttarakhand and Indian economy as a whole.


Author(s):  
Ying Chen ◽  
Qiuming Wu ◽  
Lijin Shao

With the popularity of the Internet and mobile terminals, the development of e-commerce has become hotter. Therefore, e-commerce research starts to focus on the statistics and prediction of the cargo volume of logistics. This study briefly introduced the back-propagation (BP) neural network model and principal component analysis (PCA) method and combined them to obtain an improved PCA-BP neural network model. Then the traditional BP neural network model and the improved PCA-BP neural network model were used to perform the empirical analysis of the cold chain logistics demand of fruits and vegetables in city A from 2010 to 2018. The results showed that the main factors that affected the local cold chain logistics demand were the growth rate of GDP, the added value of primary industry, the planting area of fruits and vegetables, and the consumption price index of fruits and vegetables; both kinds of neural networks model could effectively predict the cold chain logistics demand, but the predicted value of the PCA-BP neural network model was more fitted with the actual value. The prediction error of the BP neural network model was larger, and the fluctuation was obvious within the prediction interval. Moreover, the time required for the prediction by the PCA-BP neural network model was less than that by the BP neural network model. In summary, the improved PCA-BP neural network model is faster and more accurate than the traditional BP model in predicting the cold chain logistics demand.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 887-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mu-Chen Chen ◽  
Chung-Cheng Lu ◽  
Yi-Ching Liu

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deal with an optimal consolidation problem for fresh agricultural products (e.g. fruits and vegetables) in a multi-temperature joint distribution (MTJD) system that is developed to resolve the challenge of timely delivery of small and diverse shipments in food cold chains. Design/methodology/approach An integer programming optimization model is developed to consolidate a set of agricultural shipments with different storage requirements into a number of distinct containers according to the classification criteria. The formulated model for consolidating fresh agricultural products is evaluated using numerical examples. Findings Critical factors that affect the quality or shelf life of fresh agricultural products are examined to form the criteria for classifying the storage requirements of these products. The formulated model can minimize the consolidation cost and the loss of product value due to a reduction in shelf life after consolidation. Research limitations/implications Although the decision model for product consolidation developed in this paper takes into account practical concerns as much as possible, some additional conditions in the cold chain of fresh fruits and vegetables can be included to further enhance the application of the proposed consolidation model. Practical implications Provided that the container environment is appropriately controlled, the shelf life of fresh fruits and vegetables can be maintained during the logistics process. As a result, product quality can be managed to reduce product loss. Originality/value This paper adopts temperature, relative humidity and ethylene production, which generally affect the quality and shelf life of fresh agricultural products, as the main factors for determining the product consolidation. It is among the first to deal with the optimal consolidation of fresh agricultural products in the MTJD system with the consideration of product shelf life.


1975 ◽  
Vol 191 (1102) ◽  
pp. 111-129 ◽  

The frozen food industry in this country has grown from nothing to a £250 million market in just 28 years. This paper briefly outlines the background of the industry worldwide and the differing technologies involved in the production of frozen foods. It speculates on possible developments in each stage of the cold chain - from freezer trawlers and field via freezing tunnels and cold stores to retail outlets. It will also discuss the development of new varieties of fruits and vegetables, possible advances in animal and plant breeding and, above all, the better use of existing food sources. In this context the paper examines the inherent problems of consumer resistance to change.


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