---
title: "Perishable inventory and the food that expires"
description: "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?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/food-waste-and-perishables
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/food-waste-and-perishables.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "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."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["operations research", "food", "retail"]
keywords: ["food waste", "perishable inventory", "food waste reduction"]
---

# 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.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| food waste | 1 | #2881 | 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 3, 0, 4, 3, 0, 2, 0, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 3, 4, 3, 1, 1, 3, 1, 2, 5, 1, 0, 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1 | 54 |
| perishable inventory | 0 | – | 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 2, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0 | 30 |
| food waste reduction | 0 | – | 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1, 3, 2, 0, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 3, 0, 4, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 | 44 |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Perishable inventory and the food that expires. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/food-waste-and-perishables

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-food-waste-and-perishables,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Perishable inventory and the food that expires},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/food-waste-and-perishables}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).