Balancing environmental and economic performance in the food-processing industry

Changing customer requirements, unpredictable disturbances combined with expensive production facilities, are major problems for food processing companies to achieve synergy between the economic and environmental performance. There notably is a lack of tools to support decisions to explore effects on performance related to new product introductions, changes in production equipment, changes in planning concepts and their cross sections. We argue that interdisciplinary research that uses operations research techniques, operations management insights, food process technology and product design helps in exploring the effect of uncertainty in demand and production. As a result, process design can be more robust: both economic and environmental. This position paper explores the problem and the main elements of the proposed scenario-based simulation approach.