Distribution Centers

Food distribution is dynamic; recent changes in food distribution organizations and processes point to new organizations, relationships, and practices involved in providing food products. However, such changes are against the backdrop of relative stability in food distribution over the past 50 to 60 years. Other tectonic changes produced the existing system, and current changes are occurring against dramatic shifts in other food system practices established during the past 40 years. Three periods of food distribution can be characterized. The first is a preindustrial system of marketplaces and vendors, characterized by particular social and political dynamics as much as economic incentives, which bled into the second, the conventional system predominantly characterized by economic concerns of efficiency that are effected by logistics organizations of various kinds; and ...