Exploring Food Waste Reduction in Sustainable Bakery Operations Using Simulation

Food waste in the bakery industry remains one of the most pressing sustainability challenges, as the perishability of baked goods and volatile consumer demand frequently result in high levels of unsold and expired products. To address this problem, the present study develops a simulation-based decision-support framework that replicates bakery supply chain dynamics and evaluates targeted waste-reduction strategies. Using Tecnomatix® Plant Simulation, we modeled a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and three retailers, with operational assumptions reflecting oven availability, labor shifts, product shelf life, and customer purchasing behavior. The system was simulated over a 90-day horizon under three intervention scenarios: (1) manufacturer-level process improvements, (2) retailer-level adjustments through extended operating hours, and (3) integrated cross-tier collaboration. Results based on 10 simulation replications show that retailer-level operational changes generated the largest performance improvement, reducing the mean food waste rate from 16.21% in the baseline to 3.20%. The combined intervention achieved the best average overall performance, with a mean production of 13,062.8 units and a mean food waste rate of 3.15%. However, its incremental advantage over the retailer-only intervention was modest. The study contributes a detailed operational implementation of discrete-event simulation using Tecnomatix® Plant Simulation to quantify the relative and combined effects of manufacturer- and retailer-level interventions in bakery operations. The findings highlight the value of operational interventions across manufacturer and retailer activities and provide a replicable modeling framework to guide sustainability-oriented decision-making in bakery and other short shelf-life supply chains.