Causes and mitigation strategies of food loss and waste: A systematic literature review and framework development

Abstract One third of all food produced for human consumption ends up as food loss and waste (FLW) each year along the food supply chain (FSC). To prevent FLW, it is paramount to understand why food is being discarded and to identify the most appropriate mitigation strategies to implement along the FSC. In this paper, a systematic literature review approach was implemented to search and evaluate 114 peer-reviewed articles to analyse the causes and mitigation strategies of FLW. The primary focus was to classify and discuss the 80 causes and 73 mitigation strategies retrieved from the literature, taking into account the differences between: (1) different stages of the FSC, (2) countries with different levels of economic development, and (3) different food products. In conclusion, results show that the causes and the mitigation strategies of FLW are dependent on the three variables aforementioned and that they have a managerial, behavioural, technological or infrastructural focus. Developing countries report more recurrently managerial mitigation strategies and infrastructural strategies are reported more frequently in developing ones. Moreover, some causes identified in some stages of the FSC are dependent on causes encountered in other stages, vindicating the reference, in the literature, to mitigation strategies that should be applied in various stages of the FSC. Thus, the choice of the most promising mitigation strategies to reduce FLW along the FSC is not straightforward and should take into account not only the context of the problem under study, but also the root causes of FLW, their interrelatedness and their influence over that context. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a research framework to guide future investigations that seek to further study the mitigation strategies to implement to ensure an effective reduction of FLW in FSCs.