Adapting to Uncertain Food Supply and Demand
PhD research shows how flexible planning helps food companies cut waste, manage uncertainty, and balance sustainable supply and demand across farming, processing, and catering chains.
Marloes Remijnse earned her PhD at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences at Eindhoven University of Technology. In her doctoral research within the Operations Planning Accounting & Control group (OPAC), she examined how food supply chains can better balance supply and demand, also in uncertain situations.
Everyday Dilemmas
Think of cooking for guests without knowing how many will arrive. Remijnse starts from this familiar situation and scales it up to farms, factories, and canteens. Across food supply chains, mismatches between what is produced and what is needed lead to waste, rising costs, and environmental pressure. With climate change affecting harvests and eating habits changing constantly, these mismatches are becoming harder to manage.
Why Waste
Roughly one third of all food produced is never eaten. That loss represents not only wasted meals, but also wasted land, water, energy, and labor. Entrepreneurs in food production, processing, and catering face regularly decisions about how much to grow, buy, or prepare, knowing that mistakes are costly and often irreversible because food spoils.
Flexible Thinking
Remijnse shows that flexibility is central to dealing with these challenges. Her research uses mathematical optimization models to explore choices such as buying locally, reusing side streams, preserving surplus, or adjusting recipes. By testing these models with real data from a municipality, a vegetable processor, and a caterer, she demonstrates how theory can guide practical decisions.
Local Lessons
One study focuses on short food supply chains. While central collection hubs for local farmers sound appealing, the analysis reveals that low volumes make them financially unattractive. Direct delivery from farmers to customers turns out to be simpler and more viable, offering a useful reality check for entrepreneurs considering investments in food hubs.
Processing Choices
Another study examines how vegetables are processed. Turning side streams into new products can increase profits, but Remijnse finds that environmental benefits are not guaranteed. Processing requires energy, so reuse is only sustainable when the saved environmental impacts outweigh the additional transformation.
Kitchen Solutions
In catering, the research highlights the value of flexible recipes. When ingredients can be substituted, leftovers from one meal can replace fresh inputs in another. This approach lowers costs and reduces waste, helping caterers respond to uncertain demand without overserving.
Shared Impact
Across all cases, the message is consistent. There is no single fix for food waste, but building flexibility into planning, product design, and sourcing helps companies cope with uncertainty. These insights support entrepreneurs and policymakers seeking food systems that are both economically and environmentally resilient.
Marloes Remijnse defended her thesis on 19 May 2026.
Title of the thesis: .
Supervisors: Tom van Woensel, Ahmadreza Marandi, Sonja Rohmer.
Learn more about Marloes and her work in the Cursor article written by by Nicole Testerink.