Grocery stores and other retail food sellers are losing as much as $15bn a year in unsold fruits and vegetables alone, with about half of the U.S. supply going uneaten, according to an analysis on food waste by the National Resources Defense Council.
A number of macro-economic developments, such as the expansion of the Panama Canal, are driving changes in supply chain design, says John Trestrail, supply chain solutions manager at LLamasoft. "Supply chain managers are trying to understand the impact of the canal's expansion on cargo flows, especially from Asia to the East Coast," he says.
Inttra, a global electronic-commerce network for the ocean shipping industry, has formed an alliance with CargoSphere, a cloud-based confidential rate network.