A digital laboratory will model how disruptions—from floods to trade wars—ripple through the UK’s food supply chains, testing alternative sourcing strategies before crises hit. The problem is that food supply chains have become fragmented, with data locked in separate silos. When a single shock—a drought, a policy shift, or a conflict overseas—cascades through the system, it can suddenly disrupt availability, push up costs, and worsen nutritional insecurity. No existing tool lets stakeholders explore these cascading risks and unintended consequences together in real time. If successful, the lab will let retailers, policymakers, and producers test scenarios—such as shifting from home-grown to imported fruit, or responding to a biosecurity outbreak—and see the knock-on effects on cost, supply, and consumer health before making decisions. The project focuses on UK fruit, vegetables, and alternative proteins, but the modelling approach is designed to apply to any food supply network globally. This is applied, not fundamental, research. It builds on engineering and data-science methods already used in pharmaceuticals, adapted here to a concrete, real-world problem: keeping food on shelves and affordable when the unexpected happens.
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The proposal brings together expertise across the UK in modelling and measuring agri-food supply chain systems. We have developed collaborative approaches using a digital laboratory exploring supply chain configurations capable of analysing the existing fragmentary approach to food system resilience. The lab involves the creation of a highly collaborative and participatory approach to agrifood supply chains, involving interdisciplinary co-development across the biological sciences, engineering and management disciplines. Our stakeholder partners include organisations across the UK end-to-end food supply chain, who are willing to share confidential data, allowing us to integrate what have become disconnected silos of information and knowledge capable of disrupting a given food system. Our particular focus is on the balance between home (UK) production and imports, and how this may change based on cascading risks resulting from disruptions associated with economic, socio-political or climatic issues. The proposal involves the creation of an interactive lab that enables exploration of multiple scenarios involving cascade risks, and potential mitigation interventions. The lab environment will model implications of cascade risks and potential interventions, including unintended consequences. Risks considered for the food system include changes in consumer demand, retailer alternative sourcing, biosecurity, government policy, overseas conflict, flood or drought, which produce dramatic changes in the economic cost of production or future investment in infrastructure, mechanisation and labour. From the perspective of the consumer, in addition to product availability, choice, and safety, the proposal investigates factors impacting economic hardship, and nutritional insecurity and associated health problems. Our approach draws on multiple data sets from contributory stakeholders and disciplines along an entire food system. Firstly, our novel digital laboratory will apply an integrated model (first developed for Pharma) to analyse the impact of cascading risks along well documented food supply chains. Secondly, we will combine advances in visual analytics, gamification, Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) and System Dynamics Modelling (SDM) to capture the interfaces and pinch points along that supply chain, and evaluate the cumulative impact of risks (be it for UK/International sourcing, or from climate change and economic scenarios). A third work package will then explore real world scenarios, using examples of UK fruit and vegetable supply, as well as alternative protein sources, and demonstrate how advanced modelling can predict the impact of a combination of risk events, and yet sustain consistency in supply through alternative routes. Fourthly, we will then provide predictive solutions for generic supply chains, by adopting the intervention-based research method, involving defining a specific challenge, identifying interventions and designing a mitigation strategy. This will combine both digital and experimental (field work) approaches, leading to an associated outcome analysis (both desired and anomalies). We submit that the application of engineering principles based around digital supply chain modelling, when applied to real-life fruit and vegetable food supply systems, will offer a unique and insightful approach. The combination of UK academic and international commercial stakeholder inputs will ensure that outputs have broader world-wide relevance. The programme will allow scenario planning that can cope with cascading risks, suggesting alternative sourcing strategies which will maintain resilience to match supply and demand, avoiding unintended consequences for key players in another part of the supply chain. Overall, project RA(SC)2AL-(Resilience in Agrifood Systems: Supply Chain Configuration Analytics Lab) will develop novel reconfiguration and reorientation options for food supply networks centred in the UK.
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