Supply Chain Planning for Super Chilled Food Products

This paper studies a production and distribution system for food products, which are super chilled during production and then distributed in the conventional cold chain. Super chilling implies a partial freezing, which stabilizes the product temperature below 0°C during the subsequent partial thawing during the distribution. In this paper we identify the important planning decisions in relation to production and distribution. Then, a decision support model based on mixed-integer linear programming is developed for these planning tasks, which are especially focusing on packaging options and delivery intervals. An integral part of the approach is a model of the thermodynamic behavior of the food products that is used to describe the thawing process. An illustrative case study shows how the resulting models can be used to support supply chain planning for super chilled food products and how the detailed modeling of product changes allows for a significant decrease in distribution efforts even with the use of conservative shelf life estimates.

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