Sustainable food processing: A production planning and scheduling perspective

In food-processing industries, agricultural raw materials are processed into consumer products or food ingredients. Within this context, efficiency and sustainability are mainly impacted by losses of valuable food products that already caused significant monetary and environmental impacts, as well as by the inefficient use of utilities such as energy, water, and cleaning agents. In turn, these factors are mostly driven by product changeovers and cleaning of production and storage equipment. Efforts to improve the efficiency and sustainability of food processing, therefore, emphasize managerial and technological solutions to decrease the number and impact of changeovers. This chapter first distinguishes technological and managerial perspectives on product losses and utility consumption. Elaborating on the managerial perspective, we subsequently provide an overview of cyclic production planning and scheduling approaches that can be used to improve efficiency and sustainability. The intuitive nature of cyclic planning frameworks also provides a lean perspective on planning that facilitates implementation processes.