The Food SCENE Research project’s central focus is to conduct research on organizational, social and technological innovations that impact the food supply chain. Food supply chain issues are broad in nature, but these analyses result in specific recommendations that are academically robust, industry or country specific, and informative to the public. Our unique global perspective influences our research agenda in that we see the same phenomenon everyone else does but approach the questions differently.

For example, we have and are continuing to investigate such issues as how grocery firms make location decisions in some of the poorest cities in the poorest countries in the world, with limited demographic to explain why, yet there are food deserts in Detroit. How does information technology liberate specialty coffee producers from the New York Mercantile Exchange commodity price?  How will small producers remain competitive in a super-GLOBALGAP-standards world?  How does social engineering in South Africa affect the food supply chain in the short and long run?  (GLOBALGAP being the Global Partnership for Good Agricultural Practice).