Chinese Fresh Food Supply Chain: Improvement Suggestions And Analysis Based On The Comparison With The French System

Fresh food supply chain management in China is of the utmost importance, as it faces challenges to feed its numerous population, to ensure safety to the end consumer and to drag down the loss rate that is still important. The food supply chain is composed of small family-managed farms that have very little power against the wholesalers. Local governments have put a lot of effort to solve this problem, and they can benefit from studies on fresh produce supply chain.This thesis initially suggests a few axis of improvement for the fresh food supply chain in China, supported by a previous thorough analysis of the situation in France and many research papers on the subject. It focuses on two aspects: cutting down losses and balancing the profits and forces along the supply chain. Two models are built to describe the link between a farmer and a wholesaler and to study their evolution and decisions in a competitive environment.Both models consider perishable products which are described by a surviving index that characterizes the proportion of product left to be sold at the wholesale market after transportation. The different entities can agree to adopt a conservation effort, at higher cost, in order to improve this surviving index. Few papers have considered a setting where both entities enter bargaining relationships on the exchange price with asymmetric bargaining power. However it is a crucial point for this study, as schemes to enhance the farmer's weight in negotiations are analyzed. Using a Nash bargaining product, this paper studies the repartition of the profit along the chain and measure the changes brought by the variation of one's bargaining power. The first model considers the competition selling price to be a random variable with a known distribution. The second model reckon that the competitors behave in a smart way and adopt the same strategy as the chain studied. A particular attention is paid to the optimization of the supply chain and profit maximization. Contracts are discussed as well as the matter of the repartition of the profit surplus.Finally, in order to support the models and measure the different improvements, a comprehensive case study is conducted. A large set of data obtained at Beijing's Xinfadi wholesale market is used to quantify the progress and to draw conclusions considering five different citrus products.