Improving Food Supply Chain Management by a Sustainable Approach to Supplier Evaluation

Abstract

Increasing food supply chain sustainability means having to deal with many conflicting aspects and involves producers, several departments in distribution companies, and consumers. The objectives of this research are to develop models to solve real-world supplier evaluation problems and validate them with real data on fresh fruits in a supermarket chain. Literature review and results from a survey with managers from purchasing, logistics, and quality departments of a food distribution company are used to establish criteria, to first model the assessment of products and, second, to model supplier evaluation. A multicriteria hybrid approach is proposed, using multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) to assess the quality of products and Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) to complete their evaluation with strategic criteria to be included in the second phase. The results allow companies to rank suppliers by product and classify them according to the main criteria categories, such as product strategy, food safety, economic, logistic, commercial, green image and corporate social responsibility. A sorting approach is also applied to obtain ordered groups of suppliers. Finally, the models proposed can form the core of a decision support system in order to create and monitor the supplier base in food distribution companies, as well as to inform sustainable decision making.

Multicriteria sorting method based on global and local search for supplier segmentation

“…The significance of sorting problems is shown both in the growing number of articles with new methods and fields of application over the last decade (Alvarez et al, 2021). The need to assign alternatives to classes predefined and preference-ordered appears in scenarios related to supplier selection and supplier management (Araz and Ozkarahan, 2007;Barrera et al, 2022;Segura et al 2020). In addition, Chai and Ngai (2020) highlighted sorting technique adoption as one of the main trends for future research in supplier selection.…”

Optimal Decision and Coordination of Organic Food Supply Chain from the Perspective of Blockchain

“…A large number of articles have studied the problem of profit coordination between manufacturers and retailers in the supply chain, and have designed a variety of coordination mechanisms to maximize the profits of the supply chain, but only a small number of articles have included the consumers who determine product sales in the model and considered the influence of consumer mentality factors even less. Segura et al [40] found that bargaining power is the most important determinant of the relationship between core and upstream and downstream firms in the food supply chain, and the researchers studied the bargaining process between firms in the food supply chain by applying game bargaining theory. Denver et al [41] studied 149 companies at the core of the supply chain, and pointed out that companies in large industries with high uncertainty have begun to pay attention to and implement guidance, education, evaluation, and guidance on green suppliers.…”

A Novel Scenario-Based Bi-objective Optimization Model for Sustainable Food Supply Chain During the COVID-19: a Case Study

“…Accordingly, many review papers have been published on this topic with various areas of focus. Increasing food supply chain sustainability means dealing with many conflicting aspects involving producers, several distribution company departments, and consumers (Segura et al 2020 ). Supply chain sustainability refers to the transparent integration and achievement of organizations’ social, environmental, and economic goals through the effective coordination of internal organizational processes.…”