This study examines why food rescue systems in emerging economies fail to scale despite formal policy interest and develops a tax credit incentive framework for verifiable edible-surplus redistribution in Indonesia, using Bandung as the empirical context.
The study combines business process mapping, policy review and semi-structured interviews to analyze the food rescue workflow in Bandung. The resulting governance design was instantiated as a blockchain-based prototype and evaluated through functional testing, a scenario-based usability survey of 50 stakeholders and comparative benchmarking.
Analysis of the mapped workflow identifies three structural coordination barriers: enterprises treat disposal as an operational default rather than a residual outcome, food banks face dual instability in donation supply and operational capacity, and government policy recognition remains disconnected from fiscal implementation. These barriers suggest a common coordination gap: the absence of a mechanism that links enterprise incentives, food-bank capacity and government-recognized contribution records. The study specifies four design requirements under which a tax-credit incentive could support this alignment, while prototype results provide initial evidence that its verification, liquidity and certification requirements are technically feasible under simulated conditions.
The study contributes to the food rescue governance literature by specifying the conditions under which tax-credit incentives may support alignment among enterprises, food banks and government in emerging economies, and by showing through a working prototype that the proposed framework's verification, liquidity and certification requirements can be technically operationalized at low cost under simulated conditions.
