Ana Pinto de Moura

Public perceptions of food‐related hazards: an application to Portuguese consumers

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to assess public perception of food‐related hazards by Portuguese consumers at major metropolitan areas. A contrast was searched between controllable and non‐controllable hazards.Design/methodology/approach – The Perceived Food Risk Index developed by Fife‐Schaw and Rowe, was administered to a sample of 666 subjects through a door to door interview using a random route walk procedure and following a quota sampling controlled for sex, age and location. Risk perception was evaluated over ten risk characteristics, for each of the hazards.Findings – Through principal component analysis, two main components were identified: “Knowledge” and “Dread”. A perceptual map of the hazards was built over these two dimensions. A high level of worry and concern associated with fatty foods was found, clearly contradicting the expected attenuation of risk perception associated to greater perceived personal control. Contrarily to previous findings for other populations, GMOs yielded ...

A comparative evaluation of women's perceptions and importance of sustainability in fish consumption

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore womens perceptions about the benefits and risks of fish consumption, while exploring differences on their views about wild and farmed fish, considering light fish consumers.Design/methodology/approach – The methodology adopted is exploratory, using focus group technique, segregating women by education level (higher education versus lower education). A focus group guide was designed, taking into account the following dimensions: attitudes towards fish consumption and perceptions towards farmed fish relative to wild fish, also considering risk perceptions related to farmed versus wild fish.Findings – This study has shown that fish consumers enjoy the taste of fish and they are strongly convinced that eating fish is healthy. The main reason for their low fish consumption is related to perceive lacking of convenience. Women with higher education levels expressed additional knowledge considering different aquaculture systems and women with lower education leve...

Food regulations and enforcement in Portugal

This work aims to provide an introduction to food regulation and enforcement systems in Portugal, especially regarding the Portuguese country profile and organization of the competent authorities in the official control of foodstuffs, particularly the Food Safety and Economic Authority. This is a law enforcement body with police powers, responsible for the inspection of economic activity and the official control of foodstuffs, ensures risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication. It also provides an overview of the food fraud framework in Europe and Portugal, considering the powers of the Portuguese authorities and the measures to combat food fraud.

Consumer’s Valuation and Quality Perception of Kid’s Meat from Traditional “Cabrito da Gralheira”: Protected Geographical Indication

Due to several crises occurring in the past within the food sector, consumers feel more concerned about the origin of the product, the production process, and the technical composition. Their search for reinsurance has led to the development of a number of quality sales based on the product origin. Under this framework, consumer perceived Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) or Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) as product quality signals.

A Routing/Assignment Problem in Garden Maintenance Services

We address a routing/assignment problem posed by Neoturf, which is a Portuguese company working in the area of project, building and garden’s maintenance. The aim is to define a procedure for scheduling and routing efficiently its clients of garden maintenance services. The company has two teams available throughout the year to handle all the maintenance jobs. Each team consists of two or three employees with a fully-equipped vehicle capable of carrying out every kind of maintenance service. At the beginning of each year, the number and frequency of maintenance interventions to conduct during the year, for each client, are agreed. Time windows are established so that visits to the client should occur only within these periods. There are clients that are supposed to be always served by the same team, but other clients can be served indifferently by any of the two teams. Since clients are geographically spread over a wide region, the total distance traveled while visiting clients is a factor that weighs heavily on the company costs. Neoturf is concerned with reducing these costs, while satisfying agreements with its clients. We give a mixed integer linear programming formulation for the problem, discuss limitations on the size of instances that can be solved to guarantee optimality, present a modification of the Clarke and Wright heuristic for the vehicle routing with time windows, and report preliminary computational results obtained with Neoturf data.

A mathematical model for supermarket order picking

Order picking consists in retrieving products from storage locations to satisfy independent orders from multiple customers. It is generally recognized as one of the most significant activities in a warehouse (Koster et al, Eur J Oper Res 182(2):481–501, 2007). In fact, order picking accounts up to 50 % (Frazelle, World-class warehousing and material handling. McGraw-Hill, New York, 2001) or even 80 % (Van den Berg, IIE Trans 31(8):751–762, 1999) of the total warehouse operating costs. The critical issue in today’s business environment is to simultaneously reduce the cost and increase the speed of order picking. In this paper, we address the order picking process in one of the Portuguese largest companies in the grocery business. This problem was proposed at the 92nd European Study Group with Industry (ESGI92). In this setting, each operator steers a trolley on the shop floor in order to select items for multiple customers. The objective is to improve their grocery e-commerce and bring it up to the level of the best international practices. In particular, the company wants to improve the routing tasks in order to decrease distances. For this purpose, a mathematical model for a faster open shop picking was developed. In this paper, we describe the problem, our proposed solution as well as some preliminary results and conclusions.