Arizona is the nation’s winter lettuce capital, producing approximately 90% of country’s supply from November to April, according to the Arizona Farm Bureau.
But before those crispy, crunchy, leafy greens can be tossed into salads and used to top sub sandwiches, they must be transported from coast to coast, arriving fresh from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine.
Deniz Berfin Karakoc is an assistant professor of industrial engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. She researches agri-food flow networks, or how agricultural products are made, stored and moved, to best connect those who produce food with those who need it.
Karakoc has co-authored a groundbreaking paper on food transportation systems that was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Food. For the work, “Trade-offs between resilience, sustainability and cost in the US agri-food transportation infrastructure,” she collaborated with Megan Konar, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The pair of researchers have been busy looking at food transportation, analyzing routes to ensure that distribution options are well-protected, sustainable and cost-effective. Karakoc explains that the issue has been understudied.
“The U.S. is a critical part of the world’s food supply chain. It is a top exporter of cereal grains,” she says. “Agricultural studies tend to focus on vulnerabilities created by weather. But the ability to move food from production to consumption is vital.”
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