A Research on Fresh-Keeping Strategies for Fresh Agricultural Products from the Perspective of Green Transportation

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of fresh-keeping effort (FKE) investment strategies from the perspective of green transportation on a fresh-product supply chain (FSC) system for the purpose of reducing the emission of harmful gases and waste of resources. A supplier–buyer structure in an FSC system is modeled under two approaches consisting of the fixed FKE model and the variable FKE model. Then the paper analyzes the effect of optimal FKE level on retailer’s profit and product freshness under two different approaches, and finds that there is space to be improved in the two approaches which were further optimized. Finally, the proposed models are approved with a dataset from a real-life case study. Under the above two approaches, not only profits can be increased in retail enterprises but also the freshness level of fresh agricultural products (FAP) can be improved and reduced the consumption of resources. The results show that there is an optimal investment level of FKE under different strategies, and the maximum profit could be obtained by keeping fresh at this level. Moreover, the fixed FKE will not increase the average freshness of fresh produce in a sales cycle, and the adjusted FKE can effectively improve the average freshness.