View article

Two concurrent social issues in the United States are food insecurity and food waste. The practice of gleaning offers a mechanism for combining these problems to create a synergistic solution. We develop a stochastic optimization model to determine the schedule that maximizes the volume of excess crops rescued from farm fields for the purpose of feeding food-insecure households, thus maximizing social impact. We model gleaning as a service operation where donation calls arrive randomly requesting to be scheduled within a limited time window. The feature that distinguishes gleaning operations from other service settings is that there is uncertainty in both when donations will arrive and the attendance of the gleaners who are volunteers that are not obliged to attend gleaning trips. We apply our model to the gleaning operation of the Food Bank of the Southern Tier in New York State, focusing on five major …