Preventing Food Waste – Simulation Tool

Overview

The ECR Community Shrink & OSA Group is an active working group supported by senior operations leaders from over 60 retailers and manufacturers. For the last 19 years, the group have invested in new research to help the industry to together, through collaboration, better address the stubborn and connected problems of on-shelf availability, shrink and food waste. By way of an example of their work on food waste, the group commissioned leading academics in food waste from the Eindhoven University of Technology to explore the relationship between lost sales and food waste. Their paper published in late 2017 concludes that it is possible to predict and model the trade offs between losing too many sales through poor service levels to the shopper (empty shelves) and losing too much to food waste. To help “land” these findings in the real world, the academics developed an easy to use model that organisations could use to model their own data. Details on the model and how to use it can be found in the downloadable document. However, since it is not possible to upload “xlsm” files on this platform, those interested in the model itself can contact the academics directly or Colin Peacock via email to obtain a copy of the Excel file.