Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Food supply chain in UK is experiencing various forms of disruptions. Although the advances of technology and of IT provide companies with new means and sophisticated software programmes to manage their supply chain effectively, food industry continues to be vulnerable to various disruptions across all stages of the supply chain. This paper investigates the vulnerabilities of the UK food supply chain due to internal and external factors and the missing capabilities of the relevant supply chain software that major food companies are using. Moreover, disruptions are investigated based on their frequency of occurrence in time and space, their probability and their severity as well as their impact to involved companies. Eventually, the aim is to enhance supply chain resilience by creating tools in forms of algorithms, spreadsheets and decision making in order food companies to mitigate successfully the various disruptions. Furthermore, in order to create a specific framework, a food industry sector has been selected as an example. The food industry sector that has been selected is UK Dairy Industry, because of its importance and of the sensitivity of its products.