Redesigning a food supply chain for environmental sustainability – An analysis of resource use and recovery

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Food supply will need to increase by around 70% from its current levels in order to meet the world population growth of 9.6 billion by 2050. Food waste is the biggest challenge in global food security, wherein approximately 20–30% of food waste occurs in the post-harvest stage of the food supply chain (FSC) in developing countries. This food waste generates significant negative environmental effects in addition to the unnecessary usage (and wastage) of resources consumed in producing the wasted food. Whilst India is the major producer and exporter of many agricultural crops, there is a lack of research that evaluates the environmental impact of the Indian FSCs. The environmental impact of the same product varies according to the resources consumed and so it is important that the environmental impact of individual supply chains be considered. Also, there is a lack of studies that uses the result of environmental impact assessment to identify the operational and resource inefficiencies in FSC and develop a framework for sustainable FSC. Thus, this study aims to identify operational and resource inefficiencies present in FSC through environmental impact assessment and propose a framework for redesigning the FSC to improve environmental sustainability. Life cycle assessment approach is used for assessing the environmental impact. This framework has been applied to a mango food supply chain

Upstream Supply Chain Visibility and Complexity Effect on Focal Company’s Sustainable Performance: Indian Manufacturers’ Perspective

Understanding supply chain sustainability performance is increasingly important for supply chain researchers and managers. Literature has considered supply chain sustainability and the antecedents of performance from a triple bottom line (economic, social, and environmental) perspective. However, the role of supply chain visibility and product complexity contingency in achieving sustainable supply chain performance has not been explored in depth. To address this gap, this study utilizes a contingent resource-based view theory perspective to understand the role of product complexity in shaping the relationship between upstream supply chain visibility (resources and capabilities) and the social, environmental, and economic performance dimensions. We develop and test a theoretical model using survey data gathered from 312 Indian manufacturing organizations. Our findings indicate that supply chain visibility (SCV) has significant influence on social and environmental performance under the moderation effect of product complexity. Hence, the study makes significant contribution to the extant literature by examining the impact of SCV under moderating effect of product complexity on social performance and environmental performance

Robust optimization of sustainable food supply chain network considering food waste valorization and supply uncertainty

Increasing pressure from customer expectations to government regulation for sustainable food products warrants research in the sustainable food supply chain (FSC). One-third of the food produced is wasted, despite the potential to valorize food wastes. Additionally, the uncertainty associated with the supply of food products has a significant impact on the FSC decisions, steering the need for robust and sustainable models. Lastly, the issue of food perishability is missing in most optimization models. In line with the gaps identified, this study presents an integrated robust multi-objective optimization model for designing the FSC network considering all three dimensions of sustainability (economic, social and environment), whilst including FSC perishability, food waste valorization and supply uncertainty simultaneously. The proposed model is applied to a real-time case of the Indian mango pulp supply chain and yields several insights for transforming the FSC towards sustainability. This study shows the impact of focusing only on one dimension of sustainability on the other dimensions and the trade-offs among sustainability dimensions which would help the decision-maker select an appropriate non-dominated solution that aligns with the organization's sustainability goals

Developing a conceptual relationship between web service supply chain entities

Globalization has led to a new class of service apart from the services that are offered offline and semionline (in which case part of the service transactions are online and part of it offline) as a result of collaboration of static entities resulting in static service supply chains. The advent of enablers like Service Oriented Architecture and development of web service applications has enabled online / dynamic service supply chain networks (SSCNs) formed by dynamic collaboration of many serving entities. The entities in web SSCNs are interdependent and the performance of one entity impacts the performance of other entities as well as overall performance of service network. It is important to study the relationship and dependency between each entity of web SSCNs. Once the relationship is identified, it will help in devising some composite performance indicator for the entire service supply chain considering the interests of service providers and clients. We take a scenario based illustration of such online service supply chains to show the feasibility of the concept© 2011 IEEE