New Food Research Group at KLU
The food industry has seen significant changes over the past decades. The effects of climate change and a growing concern for animal welfare are just two examples of new challenges for the industry, leading to an increased demand for transparency, a strong focus on food security and sustainably-produced products. Since the end of 2020, the new KLU research group on food supply chain management has started to tackle these grand challenges and help to provide a solid scientific basis for the decisions within the industry.
“The Food Research Group at KLU seeks to combine rigorous academic research with practical insights along the entire food supply chain – i.e. from farm to fork – to investigate initiatives and improve efficiency and sustainability along the supply chain”, says Prof. Sandra Transchel, one of the two academic leads of the new group. Just recently, the COVID-19 pandemic underlined the fragility of food supply chains and the urgent need for more transparency and food safety. “Our main goal is to combine our knowledge and efforts and create a knowledge platform for state-of-the-art research and innovative concepts for managing food logistics and food supply chains of the future”, adds Prof. Hanno Friedrich, second academic lead of the.
Focus Food Safety, Effieciency and Sustainability in Food Suppy Chains
Including several Ph.D. candidates, the group is currently conducting two main research projects. The BMBF supported project “FoodDecide”, led by Prof. Hanno Friedrich, aims at developing efficient decision support software for Montenegrin food business operators and governmental agencies supporting food safety and disease outbreak investigations. The newly developed open-source software technologies will also be available for German or European stakeholders. Secondly, Prof. Sandra Transchel is leading the DFG project “Contract-based coordination of multistage fresh food supply chains to reduce food waste”. This project aims at identifying contract structures that align planning decisions and thereby reduce the amount and distribution of food waste in a sustainable way.
In the future, the new research group will add scientific and public events to their portfolio in order to enhance exchange with the scientific community and industry.
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