2022 Emerald and EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award (ODRA)

EFMD Global, in partnership with Emerald Publishing, awards doctoral research that addresses the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and focuses on responsible management to create a positive impact on both local and global scales. To promote the winner’s research, an interview-based article and an infographic will be published on Emerald's website. The findings of the awarded PhD thesis are of significant interest to practitioners, managers, and policymakers. They provide valuable information for decision-making on implementing strategies to reduce food loss and waste along fresh food supply chains. A framework that can be replicated step-by-step to minimise food loss and waste within any given business or supply chain is presented, enabling prioritising cost-effective efforts with higher environmental and social gains. In detail, the knowledge concerning which causes are more influential for the generation of food loss and waste may be used to guide practitioners in the design of policies to facilitate the mitigation and prevention of food loss and waste effectively, highlighting the need to prioritise the allocation of resources and efforts to address these causes. Furthermore, the proposed methodology to assess the mitigation strategies’ performance allows practitioners and managers to choose different evaluation criteria according to the main goals they need to achieve and, taking into consideration their business circumstances, prioritise the various mitigation strategies according to their performance under the desired criteria.