IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ajagec/v98y2016i2p549-563..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Improving Food Bank Gleaning Operations: An Application in New York State

Author

Listed:
  • Erkut Sönmez
  • Deishin Lee
  • Miguel I. Gómez
  • Xiaoli Fan

Abstract

Gleaning is increasingly attracting the attention of food safety networks, including food banks, as a valuable tool that simultaneously reduces food loss and alleviates food insecurity. However, managing gleaning operations can be challenging because the arrival of gleaning opportunities and the attendance of gleaner volunteers are both stochastic. We develop a stochastic optimization model to characterize and optimize a gleaning operation. The food bank chooses the gleaning schedule, which affects the gleaner capacity and the number of gleaning opportunities scheduled. In a specific field study of the Food Bank of the Southern Tier in New York, we analyze the tradeoff between call and volume service levels to find the optimum schedule that maximizes the expected total volume gleaned. Moreover, we find that increasing the gleaning window and increasing slot availability can be used as substitute mechanisms for increasing the total volume gleaned. Additionally, we use our model to assess the impact of recruiting more volunteer gleaners.

Suggested Citation

  • Erkut Sönmez & Deishin Lee & Miguel I. Gómez & Xiaoli Fan, 2016. "Improving Food Bank Gleaning Operations: An Application in New York State," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 98(2), pages 549-563.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:98:y:2016:i:2:p:549-563.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aav069
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Akkerman, Renzo & Buisman, Marjolein & Cruijssen, Frans & de Leeuw, Sander & Haijema, Rene, 2023. "Dealing with donations: Supply chain management challenges for food banks," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 262(C).
    2. Lee, Deishin & Sönmez, Erkut & Gómez, Miguel I. & Fan, Xiaoli, 2017. "Combining two wrongs to make two rights: Mitigating food insecurity and food waste through gleaning operations," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 40-52.
    3. Byrne, Anne T. & Just, David R., 2022. "Review: Private food assistance in high income countries: A guide for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    4. Gemma Berenguer & Zuo-Jun (Max) Shen, 2020. "OM Forum—Challenges and Strategies in Managing Nonprofit Operations: An Operations Management Perspective," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 22(5), pages 888-905, September.
    5. Barιş Ata & Deishin Lee & Erkut Sönmez, 2019. "Dynamic Volunteer Staffing in Multicrop Gleaning Operations," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 67(2), pages 295-314, March.
    6. Nino Adamashvili & Filomena Chiara & Mariantonietta Fiore, 2019. "Food Loss and Waste, a global responsibility?!," Economia agro-alimentare, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 21(3), pages 825-846.
    7. Vahideh Manshadi & Scott Rodilitz, 2022. "Online Policies for Efficient Volunteer Crowdsourcing," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(9), pages 6572-6590, September.
    8. Kelsey D. Meagher & Anne Gillman & David C. Campbell & Edward S. Spang, 2020. "Relational and Logistical Dimensions of Agricultural Food Recovery: Evidence from California Growers and Recovery Organizations," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(15), pages 1-18, July.
    9. Nur Sunar & Jayashankar M. Swaminathan, 2022. "Socially relevant and inclusive operations management," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 31(12), pages 4379-4392, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:98:y:2016:i:2:p:549-563.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.