Food waste is a pressing environmental and social issue, with grocery supply chains accounting for 42% of global food waste. While blockchain and traceability technologies offer significant potential for improvement, their adoption remains low, partly due to conflicting incentives among supply chain actors. This talk reviews the key challenges in food waste management in grocery supply chains and explores whether and how sharing product and process traceability information can reduce spoilage waste. The talk reviews policy, business initiatives, and NGO best practices and suggest ideas that may be adopted to address food waste in Hong Kong.
About the speaker
Javad Nasiry is a professor of Operations Management at McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management where he joined in 2019. His main research interests are in behavioral operations, supply chain management, sustainability, retail operations, and operations-marketing interface. His work in behavioral operations elaborates on whether and how psychological phenomena such as reference effects may affect aggregate variables (e.g., market demand) and their implications on firms’ operational policies especially in pricing, inventory, and assortment. He employs both analytical and experimental research methods to explore the related research questions. His research in sustainable operations focuses on the environmental consequences of new business models in apparel, renewable energy, and agriculture industries. Since August 2022, Javad is the director of Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI) which is a cross-faculty initiative to mobilize the talent and expertise within McGill University to help businesses move towards more socially and environmentally sustainable business models.
Prior to joining McGill, he was an associate professor of operations management in the School of Business and Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) where he joined in 2010 upon graduation from INSEAD.