Food Freight

The pressures of rising energy costs, potential carbon prices and increasing vulnerability in food supply chains are challenging to food producers and businesses, and they have important implications for food availability, access and utilisation – and hence food security.

To effectively respond to these pressures, without inadvertantly increasing energy costs, greenhouse gas emissions or vulnerability, we need to have a better understanding of both:

  • how the current system works; and
  • what our options might be to transform it (i.e. existing and emerging innovations in food distribution).

These two new reports aim to contribute to this understanding by developing new methodologies for assessing greenhouse gas emissions in transport supply chains, and reviewing innovative activity that is already taking place (in Victoria, Australia and internationally). They can be downloaded here:

Understanding Victoria’s Fruit and Vegetable Freight Movements

Best Practice Food Distribution Systems

The project has received funding support from Sustainability Victoria and Regional Development Victoria. The projects below were undertaken by CSIRO and Food-Chain Intelligence for the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab.

Understanding Victoria’s Fruit and Vegetable Freight Movements

To create a sustainable and resilient fruit and vegetable distribution system, it is useful to first try to understand the current one.

This work maps out Victoria’s fruit and vegetable freight movements from production to fork and analyses the greenhouse gas emissions produced through these movements. The analysis is focused only on the transport components of the supply chain, including refrigeration within transport where required, but it does not include energy use of emissions from production, processing, packaging etc.

It is hoped that this work will also support further exploration of the circumstances in Victoria where new systems of F&V distribution could achieve significant GHG reductions and reduced vulnerability to oil scarcity / price escalations.

This project was conducted by Leorey Marquez and Andrew Higgins at CSIRO, and Silvia Estrada-Flores from Food Chain Intelligence. For general information, contact Kirsten Larsen at the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab. For technical information, contact one of these authors.

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