Sustainability in F&B logistics involves finding ways to generate less waste of resources, time, and energy, and reduce carbon emissions, all while staying in line with government regulations and dealing with consumers’ increasing awareness of their food sources. Ideally, the process covers traceability, precision, seasonality of flows and consumer protections, but that’s easier said than done.
Players in F&B logistics have to take into account more than just purchase costs, but also ownership costs such as maintenance, operations, cleaning and disposal of materials, essentially a product’s entire life cycle.
So streamlining and automating processes to optimize the business and meet consumer needs is essential in F&B logistics. Here are three angles that help achieve higher sustainability:
Warehousing
- Implement warehouse management systems and IoT technology like voice technology, sorting systems, telematics, and energy management, warehouse solutions and management processes better automated to optimize time and space and able to function without human supervision.
- Strategically locate inventory based on operation data from similar facilities to maximize space, thus optimizing the handling of materials, orders, equipment and also personnel movement.
- Digitize warehouse processes to reduce paper consumption.
- Utilize technology like LED, natural ventilation, and daylighting technology to cut back on energy costs while maintaining the ecological balance of the warehouse.
Shipping & Transport
- Eliminate certain transport movements, such as delivering goods directly to the end customer instead of shipping products in between plants before reaching the final customer.
- Accumulate larger shipments and delay certain deliveries for a calculated time to reduce waste from idle vehicles and making multiple runs with small loads and returning with empty vehicles.
- Fill vehicles with loads from other companies, even competitors just to save costs.
- Potentially create an app that helps facilitate such processes and links companies up with one another to optimize load efficiency.
Packaging
- Create reusable packaging that can be used for every shipment.
- Reduce excess volumes of packaging to help save diesel and lessen carbon emissions by using automated box forming machines that allow for greater package sizing flexibility and reduces wasted space.
- Utilize curbside recyclable protective packaging that has been created specifically for electronics and insulated recyclable paper pads that protect temperature-sensitive and perishable goods for up to 24-48 hours.
- Sugar cane is a sustainable material that yields a negative carbon footprint due to the carbon dioxide use and oxygen release, useful for packaging as polyethene foam.
- Manage and trackback all this reusable packaging using SmartTrak as a viable system.