An Ecologically Sustainable Omnichannel Fresh Food Distribution Model Considering Freshness-Keeping Effort and Carbon Emissions

This paper proposes an economically and ecologically sustainable omnichannel fresh food distribution network considering freshness maintenance and their interplay with food quality loss. The study investigates strategic investments in freshness maintenance for competitive advantage in the presence of vehicular carbon emissions due to food miles. To this aim, a comprehensive mixed integer nonlinear programming model that captures a complex three-tier multi-echelon structure that contains various omnichannel distribution strategies is developed and solved. The model optimizes freshness-keeping effort levels and investment choice decisions simultaneously with shipment quantities and route selection, balancing economic and sustainability objectives as a single objective optimization problem. Particle swarm optimization approach was used to arrive at near optimal solutions for datasets inspired from fresh food transport of Gujarat state in polynomial time. Sample experiments on low and high demand instances indicate that there are comparable solutions with similar levels of total network costs governed by different combinations of transportation costs and total quality loss costs. Furthermore, it was observed that for majority of the routes in the upstream supply chain, the choice of investing towards freshness-keeping effort activities was chosen less frequently and with less intensity as compared to downstream stages, depicted by lower and higher number of routes and freshness-keeping effort levels selected for freshness-keeping at the respective stages. The findings offer important managerial implications for cost-effective and sustainable omnichannel fresh food distribution network design, guiding retailers and stakeholders towards making informed decisions.