The Concept of a Food Supply Chain
One of The main objectives of food supply chain management is to assure the safety of food across the global supply chain. This is possible thanks to the coordination of food related businesses. These businesses form a sequence of economic activities involved in the movement of food from production to consumption, including pre-production and post-consumption activities. The actors of a food supply chain are a group of interdependent companies working closely together to create and deliver value in the form of foods for final customers. The actors of a food supply chain are farmers, manufacturers, warehouses, vendors, wholesalers, and retailers. The integration between these parties are essential to the success of the food supply chain. Each actor of the food supply chain is in charge of a process such as production, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal. In the food supply chain, food changes its identity from farmer to consumer in a domino-like fashion. In addition to the product flow, there are two other flows in a food supply chain: information flow and financial flow (Tliche et al., 2019 & 2021). Financial flow moves from consumers to producers in the reverse process, also in a domino-like fashion (Yang et al., 2017).
The management of a food supply chain adapts the principle of push and pull integration. In a food supply chain, producers generally push products using a forecasting system and consumers pull foods by determining their demands. Here are key characters of a traditional food supply chain:
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Corporate relations in the supply chain are often framed in opposite positions, which raises some inter-organizational suspicions. Relationships are made by way of competition, even oppositional, whereby every company seeks to buy as economically and to sell as extensively as possible (Nadia et al., 2020).
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Agriculturalists, smallholders and others concerns are preserved as interchangeable and exploitable providers, often working in constrained markets or under short-term bonds led them generally to suffer the risks (Stevenson and Pirog, 2013).
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The benefits and profits from the retailing of finished foodstuffs are unevenly distributed through the supply chain, with food processors and marketers usually receiving a disproportionately higher share (Taghipour, 2020).
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Actions are gradually located and organized on a national and international measure, with food production, processing and marketing sited according to short-term financial advantages for those parties who control the chain (Taghipour et al., 2015).
Securing the food supply chain is a permanent challenge, whatever the level of decision-making and political regime. There are two ways to secure a supply chain. The first is to adapt the principles of sustainability for different decision-making processes in supply chains (Xuewen, 2007). In this case, the companies apply self-adopted policies (Taghipour and Beneteau-Piet, 2020). The second, consists in setting up control of flows by authorities such as the supply chain Act, and it can be applied whatever the country in which the actors of supply chain exist. In the following section we study more different examples of the companies, which adapted their strategy to be proactive in the management of their supply chains.