Identifying and Prioritizing Supply Chain Sustainability Indicators for Perishable Products Via Grounded Theory and Fuzzy Hierarchical Analysis Approach

Supply chain coordination from supplier selection stages to customer delivery is among the issues creating the most challenges for supply chain management, especially for short-lived and perishable foodstuffs.  The current study aims to identify and rank the factors involved in sustainable supply chain in the dairy industry. In this qualitative research, by reviewing the theoretical literature and surveying specialists and experts, the factors affecting supply chain sustainability and the sustainable supply chain dimensions (i.e., economic, social, and environmental) were identified. The determined factors were then ranked. To this end, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used as a decision-making technique and the targeted snowball sampling method was used for sampling. In the qualitative stage, factors were extracted from open interviews with 15 academic experts active in the field of sustainable development and experts in the dairy industry. The social dimension with a weight of 0.493 was recognized as the most important dimension of the sustainable supply chain according to the researchers and experts in the dairy industry. After that, the economic dimension with a weight of 0.314 was in the second rank, and finally, the environmental dimension with a weight of 0.193 was third in rank.