DOI
10.3390/su11030579

Summary
Reasons behind food loss can be very specific for each product and supply chain stage but it is also affected by factors independent of the product and stage. This work focuses on such generic factors and develops a framework to analyze food loss as a systemic outcome. The framework highlights the interconnected nature of problem across supply chain stages and therefore emphasizes the need to look at the whole system instead of specific stages, when proposing solutions. Practices and underlying causes contributing to food loss are identified for each stage of the supply chain using a literature search. Deductive logic is used to fill the gaps where literature was found to be scarce, and to derive socio-economic indicators that signal the presence of identified causes. Using this framework, we propose a non-exhaustive list of 30 socio-economic indicators, which can signal the presence of the 22 practices and 60 causes associated with food loss in supply chains. This list can serve as a starting list for practitioners and policymakers to build on when analyzing food losses in supply chains in their region. We evaluate the framework using a field-study of a tomato supply chain in Nigeria, and conclude that it can be a useful tool to identify practices, causes, and indicators of food loss.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This article uses a systems approach to show how reasons for food losses are linked across stages of a single or more supply chains and there for look at interstage linkages. This work attempts to establish a more structured link between the practices, causes, and indicators. It starts by identifying practices across supply chain stages, then identify causes underlying such practices, and finally we arrive at socio-economic indicators that can signal the presence of the identified causes in an economy. The framework emphasizes the need to be aware of the fact that their specific interventions might not yield the full potential effect because of the interrelations across supply chain stages and causes. This work is not a substitute for quantifying the impact of various causes on extent of food loss. While an attempt is made to be thorough with the posed framework, the list of possible practices, causes, and indicators should not be treated as exhaustive or complete but as a starting base to build on. The framework can be a useful tool to identify socio-economic indicators that can signal the presence of food loss in supply chain stages. Furthermore, it can be used for linking practices in a given supply chain stage with their underlying causes that appear across multiple supply chain stages.

Point of Strength
This article is useful in the analysis of a production system. The approach can be generalized, even thought this particular article refer to food systems.