Perishable inventory and the food that expires
Food waste reduction, perishable goods and perishable inventory appear on 69 recent papers, mostly in operations research, with the food waste problem studied separately in economics. Dynamic discounts, better forecasts and date labels all promise less waste. Which of them works at scale, and who captures the savings?
What prompted this
Since October 2025, 69 papers carry a food-waste, perishable, food-loss, shelf-life or expiry keyword (40 in operations research journals, 14 in economics): "food waste reduction" on 17, "perishable goods" on 14, "perishable inventory" on 12, "food waste" on 12, "shelf life" on 6. The inventory models and the policy studies rarely cite each other.
Questions
- In retailers that introduced automatic discounts on products near expiry, how much waste fell, and did the discounts cannibalize full-price sales?
- Do AI demand forecasts reduce waste more in fresh categories than in packaged ones, and do stores trust the forecasts enough to order less?
- Did changes to date labels ("best before" versus "use by") reduce household waste, and did they raise safety incidents?
Data that could help
Store-level waste and sales records from retailers, forecast system deployment dates, and household waste surveys around labelling changes.
Next step
Compare waste rates in fresh categories at stores that adopted dynamic markdowns with matched stores in the same chain that had not yet adopted them.