Food Access & Supply Chain Technology Lab

Gain access to innovative, evidence-based solutions for a variety of food supply chain and logistics challenges—developed through close collaboration between academic experts and industry partners to ensure practical impact, profitability, and sustainability.

Tap on early insights from frontier research published in top-tier journals, with opportunities to co-design studies that address your business’ most pressing operational and strategic problems.

Attend education sessions on the latest technologies, research methods, and applied use cases, curated to support talent development and strategic decision-making.

Food rescue platforms play a critical role in addressing the dual challenges of food waste and food insecurity by coordinating the redistribution of surplus food through volunteer networks. However, their operational success depends heavily on a reliable and engaged volunteer workforce—an increasingly difficult goal amid declining volunteer retention rates. We conducted a 22-week field experiment in partnership with Last Mile Food Rescue (LMFR) to evaluate the operational impact of identity-based behavioral interventions designed to sustain volunteer engagement. Drawing on self-categorization theory, we implemented two scalable, low-cost interventions that prime either the individual or social self of volunteers. Volunteers in the social self intervention group significantly increase their number of rescues by 0.310 and the likelihood of participation by 4.4% per bi-weekly interval. For LMFR, this translates into approximately 126 additional rescues and 18 more active volunteers per week. Moreover, these volunteers reduce their average rescue intervals by 10% and, on average, visit 39% and 37% more unique donor and recipient counties, respectively. Although volunteers in the individual self intervention group show limited effects in the overall sample, the intervention is highly effective among volunteers with high socioeconomic status and new recruits, highlighting the operational value of tailoring outreach strategies, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Our findings provide actionable insights into designing behavioral interventions that enhance volunteer reliability, improve sustainable labor supply, and expand geographical service coverage. More broadly, they demonstrate how nonprofits can leverage behavioral science to scale food rescue operations without incurring substantial fixed costs.

Efficient middle-mile logistics—the link between vendors and distribution facilities—are essential for maintaining profitability and service reliability in grocery retail. This project, conducted in collaboration with Meijer, analyzes the company’s shipment data to identify opportunities for cost and efficiency improvements in its U.S. distribution network. Using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models, the research develops optimized shipment policies that incorporate time consolidation (combining vendor orders across dates), distribution-facility consolidation (pooling shipments to multiple facilities), and selective split shipments. The optimized strategy improves truckload utilization from 85% to 94.8%, reduces late deliveries from 41.5% to 7.3%, and achieves total logistics cost savings of up to 30.1%, with particularly strong performance in truckload operations. These findings demonstrate how data-driven modeling and advanced optimization can yield substantial operational savings and reliability improvements in retail supply chains.