A decision making tool for food waste minimization at household level

Food waste is the mainstream issue that occurs across the whole food supply chain, resulting in significant financial and natural resources losses. At the manufacturing level, most food waste is due to overproduction, non-conform products, damaged product and packaging, poor housekeeping procedures, and poor conformity. At the retailer level, most waste derives from unsold expired products. Moreover, at the household level waste derives mostly from inefficient ways of food utilization. In this context, current resources management systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are not fully suitable to assess and characterize food waste due to a lack of interaction and communication amongst the involved stakeholders. To tackle this issue, this thesis work aims at providing a tool for supporting the reduction of food waste at the household level by allowing more intelligent meal planning, purchasing, and consumption by connecting food providers and customers. Such tool takes into account consumers preferences, dynamic quantities in recipes, remaining food items already available in the household, expiry dates management, and minimum pack sizes. From an implementation point of view, the developed tool results in a plugin to be incorporated into existing ERP systems for manufacturing, inventory, order management, and customer communications. An alignment between supply and demand helps to reduce food waste within stores, improving economic outcomes and sustainability of the supply chain. Moreover, the tool will help consumers to enter the acquisition date of food items and communicate with an alert when the expiration date of the food item will be approaching.