Donation management for menu planning at soup kitchens

The food industry is confronted with a pressure to reduce waste and to make agreements on donating surplus food to charitable organizations. Charitable organizations such as food banks and soup kitchens can use these donations in preparing food parcels or meals for their clients. For soup kitchens, donation management is strongly influencing menu planning, and conversely, menu planning considerations have a strong impact on donation management decisions. To make the best use of (mostly highly perishable) food donations, we develop an MILP model for integrated donation management and menu planning that proposes a menu plan and suggests which (part of the) donations to accept. The combination of menu planning and donation management is essential for soup kitchens, but has not been studied before.

[1]  L. Trevena,et al.  Experiences of food insecurity among urban soup kitchen consumers: insights for improving nutrition and well-being. , 2006, Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

[2]  Reha Uzsoy,et al.  Modeling for the equitable and effective distribution of donated food under capacity constraints , 2016 .

[3]  G. Stigler.  The Cost of Subsistence , 1945 .

[4]  Barbara Koroušić Seljak,et al.  Computer-based dietary menu planning , 2006 .

[5]  Deishin Lee,et al.  Converting retail food waste into by-product , 2017, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[6]  Joel P. Stinson,et al.  Scheduling and resource allocation in a food service system , 1984 .

[7]  José L. Verdegay,et al.  Application of fuzzy optimization to diet problems in Argentinean farms , 2004, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[8]  L. A. Quinn,et al.  A recipe-based, diet-planning modelling system , 1995, British Journal of Nutrition.

[9]  Christina R. Scherrer,et al.  A specialized column generation approach for a vehicle routing problem with demand allocation , 2013, J. Oper. Res. Soc..

[10]  M. Lumbers,et al.  Food access and dietary variety among older people , 2004 .

[11]  Lilly M. Lancaster,et al.  The history of the application of mathematical programming to menu planning , 1992 .

[12]  Seyed M. R. Iravani,et al.  Sequential Resource Allocation for Nonprofit Operations , 2014, Oper. Res..

[13]  Joseph L. Balintfy.  Menu planning by computer , 1964, CACM.

[14]  M. Barker,et al.  Food Choice And Nutrient Intake Amongst Homeless People , 2013, Journal of human nutrition and dietetics : the official journal of the British Dietetic Association.

[15]  Kazato Oishi,et al.  Application of the modified feed formulation to optimize economic and environmental criteria in beef cattle fattening systems with food by-products , 2011 .

[16]  Lauren B. Davis,et al.  Estimating available supermarket commodities for food bank collection in the absence of information , 2015, Expert Syst. Appl..

[17]  Esra Bas,et al.  A robust optimization approach to diet problem with overall glycemic load as objective function , 2014 .

[18]  Christina R. Scherrer,et al.  The stop-and-drop problem in nonprofit food distribution networks , 2014, Ann. Oper. Res..

[19]  M. Visser,et al.  Dutch food bank parcels do not meet nutritional guidelines for a healthy diet , 2016, British Journal of Nutrition.

[20]  Lauren B. Davis,et al.  Scheduling Food Bank Collections and Deliveries to Ensure Food Safety and Improve Access , 2014 .

[21]  Seyed M. R. Iravani,et al.  Multi-vehicle sequential resource allocation for a nonprofit distribution system , 2014 .