Identifying and prioritizing the factors contributting to sustainability of food supply chain

Supply chain sustainability is one of the newfound concepts in operation and production management that emphasizes on social and enviromental issues beside financial performance in network organizations. The aim of this study is to identify and prioritize the factors contributing to supply chain sustainability in food industries. To achieve these goals, in the first step, it is attempted to identify the factors affecting a sustainable agriculture supply chain (citrus fruits).
In this step, extensive literature review in relation to sustainable agriculture/food supply chain was identified, and the overall indicators affecting the agricultural supply chain were extracted. In the second step, the extracted factor indicators were categorized in sustainable supply chain dimensions (economic, social, and environmental) in agriculture sector (citrus fruits). In the next step, by using analytic network process technique, the weight of criteria was identified.
Findings: In this section, the pairwise comparisons and relative weights were calculated by Super Decision software and after the formation of super matrixes, the final weights of 9 main indicators of supply chain sustainability in agricultural sector were determined.
The obtained results reveal that efficiency and market focus, water consumption, energy consumption, waste recycling, transport, volume of hiring, the quality of hire, and balance in hiring are the most important criteia. According to the experts’ judgement, economic dimension (0.488) had a heavier weight compared to two ather dimensions of sustainability. This implies that it is a necessity to pay attention to the efficiency of the energy sector and sustainable agriculture supply chain in our country.