Ecological performance of past and present apple supply chains

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct typical German fruit supply chains of the past and the present. Basis for this is the definition of key areas to the supply chain and its ecological performance. The development of areas like: supply chain structure, players, locations and technologies/ methods are outlined and later on compared. For this purpose, scientific publications and available historical descriptions were used and subjected to a literature analysis. The research question is: Which conclusions for an ecologically designed fruit supply can be derived from the comparison of past and present practices in fruit supply chains?