Socially sustainable procurement model
针对果汁生产商从贫困种植者采购苹果以缓解贫困但影响风味的矛盾，构建了考虑消费者偏好的采购模型，分析社会可持续目标对利润的影响。
Social sustainability is recognised as a nascent field of study in operations research. However, the relevant literature has few models that incorporate the social impact of decision making. This study addresses the research gap by developing a procurement model for a real-life case of a juice producer committed to buying from vulnerable growers to alleviate poverty. Buying from these growers, however, has an adverse effect on juice flavour. The producer, therefore, sources apples with robust flavours from designated growers to create a strong base for the blend and adds apples sourced from the vulnerable growers. We develop a flavour loss function that relates procurement decisions to profitability, considering blending options and the effects of consumers’ preferences. We conduct optimisation sensitivity analyses to study the impact of varying social sustainability targets (SSTs) on profitability under various blend base strengths. Results show that whilst blends with a stronger base are more profitable at low SST, they become less profitable at high SST. We also find remarkable effects of consumers’ preferences on model performance. Accordingly, we propose a marketing strategy for improving social sustainability without compromising profitability.