Nowadays, the food industry is facing various challenges including but not limited to reducing food waste, improving food quality and safety, and becoming more ecofriendly. To address these challenges, it is critical to implement efficient and effective quality and operations management in food supply chains. A food supply chain can be comprehensive as “from-farm-to-fork” and include members like farms, transportation firms, distributors, grocery stores, and consumers. In such a food supply chain, its members have to make sure that the food quality level is at least safe and satisfactory to be attractive to consumers. On the cost side, minimizing the operations cost along the whole supply chain through means like efficient transportation, storage, and assortment planning is critical for maintaining a competitive edge.

While cost reduction and improving supply chain efficiency have been the traditional focuses of food supply chain management, many food companies, large or small, have realized the value of quality and operations working together. In each stage of a food supply chain, an effective quality management system can improve operations process control, reduce wastage, lower costs, meet customers’ expectation, avoid brand devaluation, and eventually increase market share. Hence, coordinating the quality control processes involving all partner organizations in a food supply chain has become an increasingly important issue in operations management.

The purpose of this special issue is to publish high-quality research articles as well as reviews that seek to address various quality and operations management problems in food supply chains. Through those articles, academic researchers, industry practitioners, governmental regulators, and not-for-profit organizers can be much better informed about the challenges and their solutions and opportunities in food supply chains.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Supply chain coordination in food quality
• Quality in food supply chain efficiency
• Empirical studies analyzing the effectiveness of quality management in food supply chain
• Quality risk in food supply chain
• Quality measurement in food supply chain
• Food quality management in cold chain
• Food safety and security issues in food supply chain
• Operations management approaches to food quality management
• Network design and optimization with food quality control