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Perishable inventory management for the grocery sector has become more challenging with extended omnichannel activities and emerging consumer expectations. This paper aims to identify and formalize key performance measures of omnichannel perishable inventory management (OCPI) and explore the influence of operational and market-related factors on these measures.

The inductive approach of this research synthesizes three performance measures (product waste, lost sales and freshness) and four influencing factors (channel effect, demand variability, product perishability and shelf life visibility) for OCPI, through industry investigation, expert interviews and a systematic literature review. Treating OCPI as a complex adaptive system and considering its transaction costs, this paper formalizes the OCPI performance measures and their influencing factors in two statements and four propositions, which are then tested through numerical analysis with simulation.

Product waste, lost sales and freshness are identified as distinctive OCPI performance measures, which are influenced by product perishability, shelf life visibility, demand variability and channel effects. The OCPI sensitivity to those influencing factors is diverse, whereas those factors are found to moderate each other's effects.

To manage perishables more effectively, with less waste and lost sales for the business and fresher products for the consumer, omnichannel firms need to consider store and online channel requirements and strive to reduce demand variability, extend product shelf life and facilitate item-level shelf life visibility. While flexible logistics capacity and dynamic pricing can mitigate demand variability, the product shelf life extension needs modifications in product design, production, or storage conditions. OCPI executives can also increase the product shelf life visibility through advanced stock monitoring/tracking technologies (e.g. smart tags or more comprehensive barcodes), particularly for the online channel which demands fresher products.

This paper provides a novel theoretical view on perishables in omnichannel systems. It specifies the OCPI performance, beyond typical inventory policies for cost minimization, while discussing its sensitivity to operations and market factors.

Shelf‐life of cultured milk products is longer than milk but it is still limited. Shelf‐life of cultured milk products could be enhanced by adopting various techniques. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the longer shelf‐life thus attained would extend the market reach and would be economically beneficial to both producers and consumers.

Attempt has been made to enlighten the various techniques such as bacteriocin (nisin, Microgard^TM, natamycin, etc.), lactoperoxidase‐thiocyanate‐hydrogen peroxide system (LP‐system), high pressure treatment, post‐production heat‐treatment (thermization, microwave heating), ultra‐violet (UV) irradiation, carbonization, etc.

Application of more than one bacteriocin may be advantageous to minimize the possibility of survival of microflora resistant to a particular bacteriocin. Pasteurization, being more detrimental to dietetic properties of cultured milk products than thermization, its application is not suggested as a method of preservation. Microwave heating may be better than conventional pasteurization.

Conjugated application of various techniques would be more efficacious in extending the shelf‐life of cultured milk products. Extension in shelf‐life of cultured milk products would be economically beneficial for producers and consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether an existing sourcing strategy can effectively supply products of appropriate quality with acceptable levels of product waste if applied to an international perishable product supply chain. The authors also analyse whether the effectiveness of this sourcing strategy can be improved by including costs for expected shelf life losses while generating order policies.

The performance of sourcing strategies is examined in a prototype international strawberry supply chain. Appropriate order policies were determined using parameters both with and without costs for expected shelf life losses. Shelf life losses during transport and storage were predicted using microbiological growth models. The performance of the resulting policies was assessed using a hybrid discrete event chain simulation model that includes continuous quality decay.

The study's findings reveal that the order policies obtained with standard cost parameters result in poor product quality and large amounts of product waste. Also, including costs for expected shelf life losses in sourcing strategies significantly reduces product waste and improves product quality, although transportation costs rise.

The study shows that in perishable product supply chain design a trade-off should be made between transportation costs, shortage costs, inventory costs, product waste, and expected shelf life losses.

By presenting a generically applicable methodology for perishable product supply chain design, the authors contribute to research and practice efforts to reduce food waste. Furthermore, product quality information is included in supply chain network design, a research area that is still in its infancy.

The technology of time temperature integrators (TTI) is used to ensure the safety and quality of temperature sensitive goods such as food and drugs along their entire lifespan. This work aims to provide a better understanding of potential benefits that can be expected from the use of TTIs in terms of supply chain improvement.

Based on the different types of information provided by TTIs: information on products' freshness and information on products' remaining shelf lives, the paper identifies qualitatively the benefits that would stem from each type of information.

A framework is built to evaluate the benefits, in terms of cost reduction and/or quality service improvement, that would stem from information provided by TTIs. Illustrative models are also developed in order to quantify some of these benefits.

The coexistence on products' packaging of a printed use by date and a TTI device can be misleading for consumers. Besides, the benefits that supply chain actors will achieve by using TTIs will vary by product category and are dependent upon the level at which the TTI device is used. Further research and case studies have to be developed in order to bring further answers to these issues.

This paper is one of the first studies that helps companies in the food and the health care industry to better understand the benefits of using TTIs from an operations management point of view and to evaluate whether it can be advantageous to deploy this technology or not.

This work differs from investigations in literature in that it identifies exhaustively and qualitatively the benefits of TTIs and to give perspectives for quantitative models that can be developed to assess these benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of sharing and utilizing remaining shelf life (RSL) information from grocery stores by the use of age-based replenishment policies for perishables.

The performance is evaluated through a discrete event simulation model, which mirrors a part of one of Norway’s largest grocery retailer and uses their POS data to reflect a realistic demand pattern of 232 stores for one year.

The findings indicate that a current age-based replenishment policy (EWA policy) provides a significant improvement of 17.7 percent increase in availability for perishables with a shelf life between 4 and 11 days, but suffers from high inventory levels and only reduces waste by 3.4 percent compared to a base stock policy. A proposed adjustment to the EWA policy, EWA_SS, provides a more balanced performance in the conducted study with a reduction of 10.7 percent waste and 10.3 percent increase in availability by keeping the same average inventory level.

Sharing and utilizing RSL information for replenishment of perishables with a predetermined shelf life between 6 and 11 days can be beneficial, and could enable the replenishment processes to be automated. However, for products with longer shelf life, the benefits slowly diminish.

The study proposes a new age-based replenishment policy which in the conducted study showed a more balanced performance improvement, in both waste and availability, compared with previous replenishment policies.

The purpose of this study was to prepare alginate and chitosan-based edible coatings incorporating Schinus terebinthifolia and Piper nigrum essential oils. The prepared films were applied on minimally processed pineapple to study the microbial inhibition of Gram + and Gram – bacteria and fungi and to evaluate the shelf life of the minimally processed fruit.

In this study alginate and chitosan-based edible coating were prepared and applied on minimally processed pineapple. The edible coatings were evaluated microscopically, by the power of reducing microbial contamination, by the shelf-life improvement.

This study demonstrates that the incorporation of the essential oils P. nigrum and S. terebinthifolia contributed to the inhibition of all the microorganisms studied and improved the shelf life of minimally processed pineapple. This is especially true for P. nigrum in the chitosan-based edible coating, where the shelf life was improved by 45 days.

Because of the pandemic, it was not possible to perform the sensory analyses of the antimicrobial alginate and chitosan-based edible coatings prepared.

From the results obtained, it is possible to state that the antimicrobial alginate and chitosan-based edible coatings incorporating S. terebinthifolia and P. nigrum essential oils can be used on minimally processed fruits and prolong their shelf life.

Due to the lifestyle of modern consumers, who demand speed and practicality and the need to consume fruits for health and quality of life, minimally processed fruits covered with edible coatings incorporating natural antimicrobial additives can provide a practical solution.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that alginate and chitosan-based edible coatings that incorporate P. nigrum and S. terebinthifolia applied on minimally processed fruit, have been studied.

This article highlights current research at the Leatherhead Food Research Association which is relevant to shelf‐life assessment of food products. One area is to improve the quality and safety of fish ‐ both fresh and cold‐smoked. Food MicroModel, a computer software package which aids in the prediction of the microbiological safety and spoilage potential of food products, is described. New methods capable of predicting the stability of oils and fats to oxidation, which can be a significant cause of reduced shelf‐life in fat‐containing foods, are described. Novel analytical instruments, known as electronic noses, have been shown to have potential, as has a total antioxidant activity test. Temperature control in factories is often a compromise between product safety and the need to maintain reasonable employee working conditions. This is no longer a problem with the development of glove box technology, which separates the two environments. The final study discussed in this article is the development of accelerated shelf‐life tests for chocolate products.

Sensory evaluations to determine the shelf life of food products are routinely conducted in food experimentation as a part of each product development program, whether it includes a new product, product improvement or a change in type or specification of an ingredient. In such experiments, trained panelists are asked to judge food attributes by reference to a scale of numbers. The “failure time” associated with a product unit under test is usually defined as the time required to reach a cut‐off point previously defined by the food company. Important issues associated with the planning and execution of this kind of testing are total sampling size, frequency of sample withdrawals, panel design, and statistical analysis of the panel data, to list a few. Different approaches have been proposed for the analysis of this kind of data. In particular, Freitas et al. proposed an alternative model based on a dichotomization of the score data and a Weibull as the underlying distribution for the time to failure. Also, through a simulation study, the bias and mean square error of the estimates obtained for percentiles and fraction defectives were evaluated. These quantities were used to estimate the shelf life. The simulation study used only the same sample plan implemented in the real situation. This paper focuses on the planning issues associated with these experiments. Sample plans are contrasted and compared in a simulation study, through the use of the approach proposed by Freitas et al.. The simulation results showed that, in general, one can get results much more precise and with smaller bias with a shorter follow‐up time, allocating more panelists to each evaluation time.

The purposes of this paper are to determine the nutritional composition of the pulp and its antioxidant activity; study the effect of drying and storage on the nutritional composition and antioxidant of the pulp; investigate the effect of de-bittering using fermentative microbes, sodium carbonate and polyethylene glycol (PEG) on antioxidant of the pulp, and to study the shelf-life and sensory evaluation of de-bittered pulp products.

The ripe fruits of palmyra (Borassus flabellifer L) were collected around Kupang city, Indonesia. The pulp was extracted with different techniques. The fresh pulp was directly analyzed for its nutritional and antioxidant properties. The rest of the pulp was de-bittered, dried and used for further treatments and products development. The de-bittered pulp was used to make chips, stick cracker, and jelly sweet. Fresh products were sensory evaluated by 30 semi-trained panelists. For shelf-life analysis, products were wrapped and/or packed with different thickness of food grade plastic, plastic-alumina foil, or mica stopples and kept at different temperatures (30, 40 and 50^oC) for one month.

The fresh pulp contains carotenoids (609.10 mg per kg of pulp), vitamin C (461.40 mg per kg of pulp), polyphenols (270 mg per kg of pulp) and anthocyanin (53.90 mg per kg of pulp). Free radical scavenging activity of the dried pulp (water content of 11.60 percent) was 93.4 percent. Several techniques including fermentation, sodium carbonate, and PEG treatment have been successfully developed to reduce the bitterness of the pulp without significantly reducing its antioxidant activities. Food products (chips, stick cracker, and jelly sweet) have then been developed and have got positive response from panelist.

Pulp of fruit is a potential source of antioxidants, i.e. carotenoids (pro vitamin A), vitamin C, and polyphenols. The pulp potentially can be used in fresh and dried form for functional food. The bitterness of the pulp can be significantly reduced using fermentation, sodium carbonate or PEG treatment. The pulp can be utilized for producing chips, crackers, and semi moist food products.

First, pulp of the palmyrah fruit can be easily extracted using water. Second, the bitterness of the pulp can be reduced by using traditional fermentation starter. Third, many type of food products can be developed using the palmyrah pulp.

This effort offers opportunity for farmers to optimize the use of palmyrah pulp for functional food. It will provide new jobs and increase the income of farmer at East Nusa Tenggara Province.

The study has revealed that pulp of palmyrah fruit is a source of antioxidants: carotenoids (pro vitamin A), vitamin C, and polyphenols. The pulp potentially can be used in fresh and dried form for functional food. The bitterness of the pulp can be significantly reduced using fermentation, sodium carbonate, and PEG. The pulp can be utilized for producing chips, crackers, and semi moist food products.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.