Design of a Stochastic Cold-Stored Strawberry Supply Chain Model

Supply chain systems for fresh produce are essential parts of the food industry, ensuring timely delivery of fruits and vegetables to customers at the right cost and desired quality. In recent decades, researchers have been advocating for hub-and-spoke network models as a method to optimize large-scale food Supply Chains (SC). While the traditional optimization of SC addresses inefficiencies, most of the conventional models are deterministic and fail to consider the implicit variability of crop yields and the consequence of climate change on the agricultural supply. The increasing concentration of CO2, along with the shifts in weather patterns, pose various threats, including fluctuations, to the supply of produce. These fluctuations may prompt distributors to seek alternative suppliers in distant areas, introducing additional costs as the SC needs to be reconfigured. This thesis introduces a stochastic hub-and-spoke network model along with an optimization algorithm, aiming to optimize the distribution and transportation network while considering climate variability and its impact on crop yield. The practical application is demonstrated through a stochastic Cold Food Supply Chain (CFSC) case study for strawberries in California, incorporating multiple weather scenarios and real soil data. The analysis reveals a significant increase in the average supply per farm between the best- (75th percentile) and worst-case (25th percentile) scenarios within each RCP projection. These findings highlight a correlation between higher precipitation scenarios and increased crop yield, while lower precipitation levels lead to reduced fresh fruit production. The heightened crop yield offers distributors an opportunity to lower transportation costs by sourcing more produce from nearby farms. Notably, a detailed analysis of transportation costs reveals that about 80% of the total cost difference between these scenarios can be attributed to the transportation of produce from farms to other nodes in the network.