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Abstract— Agricultural development plays a role in providing food supply, maintaining food scarcity and maintaining food prices so as not to fluctuate and evenly distribute food, becoming a major problem in each region. Banten Province with regional potentials that have a surplus of food products and a wide area that is adequate has the potential to develop a food distribution center. The aim of a food distribution center is to meet food supply chain chain throughout the region, avoid food scarcity, stabilize food prices and maintain price disparities thus they can be properly met. The role of food hubs is to aggregate, distribute and market food at the farmer, trader level, and to function the role of the BUMD in realizing the operation of the food distribution center. Short food supply chain chains cut costs of crop production in farmers, food distribution costs and transportation costs from farmers to distribution centers. Government policies through relevant local government agencies must be able to move the role of stakeholders in this case farmers, traders, distributors, transportation services in realizing the operation of the food distribution center to provide food procurement services and able to provide welfare levels, especially small farmers as producers in the supply chain of food products.

The Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with a 'failed' state, requires regular financial assistance from international funds and remains exposed to external economic pressures. State food distribution in the country, however, adheres to traditional statist policies and institutions that disappeared elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1980s and 1990s. Relevant literature arguably does not anticipate this outcome. This article proposes that political institutions associated with Dominican democratisation since the late 1970s, particularly strong presidentialism, a stable, non‐ideological party system and high voter turnout at elections, provide incentives for a status quo, clientelistic policy in this strategic area of social policy.

[EN] Supplier evaluation is a relevant task of supply chain management where multicriteria methods make great contributions to manufacturing industries. This is not the case in food distribution companies, which have a key role in providing safe and affordable food to society. The purpose of this research is to measure the sustainability of products and suppliers in food distribution companies through a multiple criteria approach. Firstly, the system proposed provides indicators to qualify products and assess the food quality, using the compensatory Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) model. Secondly, these indicators are included in supplier evaluation, which takes economic, environmental, and social criteria into account. MAUT and Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE), a non-compensatory method, are used for supplier evaluation. This approach has been validated for fresh food in a supermarket chain, mainly using historical data. Partial indicators, such as food safety scores, together with global indicators of suppliers, inform the most appropriate decisions and the most appropriate relations between companies and providers. Poor performance in food safety can lead to the disqualification of some suppliers. MAUT is good for qualifying products and is easy to apply at the operational level in logistic platforms, while PROMETHEE is more suitable for supplier segmentation, as it helps to identify supplier strengths and weaknesses. ; This research was funded by the Regional Ministry of Education, Research, Culture and Sport of the Autonomous Government of the Valencian Region, Spain, grant number AICO/2017/066. ; Segura Maroto, M.; Maroto Álvarez, MC.; Segura García Del Río, B. (2019). Quantifying the Sustainability of Products and Suppliers in Food Distribution Companies. Sustainability. 11(21):1-18. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11215875 ; S ; 1 ; 18 ; 11 ; 21 ; Thies, C., Kieckhäfer, K., Spengler, T. S., & Sodhi, M. S. (2019). Operations research for sustainability ...

Despite increased international recognition that it is incumbent upon state governments to provide for the food security of all of their citizens, hunger remains an enormous problem throughout the developing world. Many countries have begun to implement constitutional and statutory changes to their administrative structures, radiating decision-making and spending power outward from the central government. This decentralization has aided municipal governments in caring for their citizens. In the case of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, food distribution programs have succeeded in reducing hunger, unlike similar federal programs conducted throughout the twentieth century. Political changes that have allowed cities like Belo Horizonte to redefine the nature of municipal responsibilities and citizen rights over the past decade involve the entire community in administrative efforts to proffer needed services. This case should be viewed as a "best practice" that may be extended to municipalities in other emerging democracies. Adapted from the source document.

Penn researchers developed a centralized, citywide system for getting clinically ordered food to food insecure outpatients

AbstractThis paper studies a scheduling problem arising in a beef distribution system where pallets of various types of beef products in the warehouse are first depalletized and then individual cases are loaded via conveyors to the trucks which deliver beef products to various customers. Given each customer's demand for each type of beef, the problem is to find a depalletizing and truck loading schedule that fills all the demands at a minimum total cost. We first show that the general problem where there are multiple trucks and each truck covers multiple customers is strongly NP‐hard. Then we propose polynomial‐time algorithms for the case where there are multiple trucks, each covering only one customer, and the case where there is only one truck covering multiple customers. We also develop an optimal dynamic programming algorithm and a heuristic for solving the general problem. By comparing to the optimal solutions generated by the dynamic programming algorithm, the heuristic is shown to be capable of generating near optimal solutions quickly. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2003