Drivers of Product Expiration in Consumer Packaged Goods Retailing

Management Science, Forthcoming

44 Pages Posted: 28 Dec 2017 Last revised: 29 Dec 2017

See all articles by Arzum Akkas

Arzum Akkas

Boston University - Questrom School of Business

Vishal Gaur

Cornell University - Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management

David Simchi-Levi

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - School of Engineering

Date Written: December 26, 2017

Abstract

Product expiration is an important problem in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry costing 1-2% of gross retail sales and eroding industry profits substantially. It can be caused by several factors related to store operations, supply chain practices, and product demand characteristics. Existing methods used in the industry are inadequate to identify the causes of expiration, leading to inadequate efforts to reduce expiration. Using retail data for 768 SKUs and 10,000 stores (745,638 store-SKU level observations) as well as upstream supply chain data from a CPG manufacturer, we show the extent to which expiration of products in retail stores is driven by case size, inventory aging in the supply chain, minimum order rules, manufacturers' incentive programs for the salesforce, replenishment workload, and many control variables. A counterfactual analysis based on the model shows that our subject manufacturer can reduce expiration by up to $38.82 million per year by implementing four selected initiatives involving case size, supply chain aging, minimum order rules, and sales incentives. Further, targeted initiatives can be designed using combinations of these variables for subsets of products with the highest occurrence of expiration.

Keywords: retail operations, consumer packaged goods, product expiration, food waste, empirical, perishable inventory, supply chain management, marketing/operations interface, sustainable operations management, zero-inflated models

Suggested Citation

Akkas, Arzum and Gaur, Vishal and Simchi-Levi, David, Drivers of Product Expiration in Consumer Packaged Goods Retailing (December 26, 2017). Management Science, Forthcoming , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3093286

Arzum Akkas (Contact Author)

Boston University - Questrom School of Business ( email )

595 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA MA 02215
United States

Vishal Gaur

Cornell University - Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management ( email )

Ithaca, NY 14853
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/Gaur/

David Simchi-Levi

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - School of Engineering ( email )

MA
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
326
Abstract Views
1,190
Rank
169,366
PlumX Metrics