Identifying significant drivers for sustainable practices in achieving sustainable food supply chain using modified fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory approach

Abstract

Food manufacturing supply chain is usually characterised by various sustainability issues along with product quality and safety as serious concerns. In the current literature, the identification of drivers that would promote sustainable supply chain management becomes a popular theme and draws significant attention from domain scholars. Despite its popularity both in theory and practice, current works fail to ground these drivers on target sustainability practices which would have provided direct vertical links. Thus, this study attempts to identify sustainability drivers for food manufacturing supply chain management with the goal of making the target sustainable practices as grounds for the identification process. The fuzzy set theory is used to handle the vagueness associated with the elicitation of the degree of impact relations of drivers and practices by expert decision-makers and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory approach is used to identify significant causal relations of drivers to practices. Findings suggest that the: 1) accessibility to products, services, and employment; 2) objective fulfilment, accurate supplier negotiation, accessibility of information; 3) socially responsible business practices are the significant drivers that promote most sustainable practices.