## 1 Introduction  
Modern supply chains must not only be cost efficient and guarantee quick responses to their customers, but must also guarantee the alignment of the interests of its stakeholders and the equitable distribution in costs and margins. The location of facilities is a strategic decision that has a significant influence in supply chain performance that can create a competitive advantage in commercial supply chains and improve coverage in public supply chains. A good facility location strategy can also significantly decrease the transportation and emission costs, and mitigate its environmental impact. This research addresses a real problem of a fresh food supply chain in rural areas of Central Colombia. This problem is currently under study by RAP-E-(Administrative Officefor Special Regional Planning--in Spanish), a region-wide public institution responsible for designing and implementing public policies for its food supply master plan. As such, this paper not only fed its models with real data, but also received valuable inputs from the senior RAP-E-management. The fresh food supply chain studied in this paper is typical in emerging economies. In general, a large number of fragmented and disperse farmers supply fresh products to urban areas. These farmers rely heavily on intermediation that increases the prices paid by the final customers and create handling problems and food losses [1]. In central Colombia, this issue of intermediation has been long discussed, and several actions have been devised by local and central governments to reduce or eliminate its impact [2]. The most prominent was the construction of urban food hubs in Bogota, the country capital [2]. This strategy was designed to directly connect farmers and shop owners with the support of an information system. The main idea was that shop owners placed orders directly to farmers through an Internet platform and a third-party logistics (3-PL) company were responsible for the hub operation and for the transportation of the agricultural products from the countryside to the city hubs. Important efforts were made by the mayor office of Bogota to create networks of both shop owners and farmers and to educate them in the best commercialization and technology practices. Unfortunately, this strategy failed due to several reasons that included lack of Internet connectivity and poor logistics and business considerations [1]. No major 3-PL company participated in the concession bid, and the farmers' and shop owners' networks disbanded after a few attempts. A recent research [1] showed that the best strategy in terms of profits was intermediation. More recently, the COVID 19 pandemic has seen a number of apps supported by Industry 4.0 technologies (e.g., [3,4]) which link farmers directly with both store owners and final consumers. As of today, these efforts have been modest at best and the vast majority of products is still traded through mididlemen. There are several reasons, as pointed out in [5]: Middlemen play a significant role in this type of supply chain by matching supply and demand and shortening transaction times [6]. They also have a close relationship with farmers, as they, farmers, and middlemen, often live in the same region and share traditions and culture [5,7]. This fragmented farming system is also very inefficient in logistics and environmental terms: For example, an estimate of 12,000 trucks arrive daily to Bogota with fresh food products. Most of these trucks are small and old 10-ton vehicles that travel half-loaded from locations within a 200 Km radius [1,8]. A common strategy to mitigate intermediation and to help small and mid- size farmers access larger markets is the development of regional food hubs. This strategy has been implemented in both first world [9,10] and in emerging countries [11,12].