Karel Van Donselaar, Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands.

Myself and Rob have a background in inventory control, warehousing and mathematical modelling. Some 20 years ago we started to do research on retail operations, studying ways to make the handling in stores and DC’s more efficient, improving replenishment systems and optimising warehouse operations. We noted fresh products deserve special attention since it is a very important product category for supermarkets, while little scientific research was done in this area. We feel our science should not be purely theoretical, but should be aimed to improve business performance and society at large. To this end we found an excellent way of keeping in touch with the retail business in the ECR Food Waste working group. They give us constant feedback and new ideas for research. They are also eager to learn from our research findings. Through this interaction our ideas get actually implemented, resulting for example in 1 million euro waste reduction at a retailer in Central Europe, who applied the Fresh Case Cover concept published in one of our industry reports available on the ECR-website. This and other implementations resulted in winning the Valorisation Award at Eindhoven University in 2019. So participation in this ECR working groups is a true win-win for all members and we are proud to be part of the team.