Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Sustainable Food Supply Chains

How do food supply chain performance measures contribute to sustainable corporate performance during disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic emergency?

Purpose

This study aims to the development of the scale of supply chain performance measures (SCPMs), food supply chain resilience (FSCS) and sustainable corporate performance (SCP) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in an emerging market. Based on this purpose, the study examines the relationships between SCPMs and SCP by exploring the mediating role of FSCS in emerging markets.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on a comprehensive literature review on the SCPMs, FSCS and SCP, the author evaluates the nexus of these constructs on disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency in an emerging market. The article follows a quantitative approach. A total of 567 valid responses from managers at senior and middle levels were received and used for data analysis. The Smart PLS version 3.3.2 was employed to analyse Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to investigate the relationships between constructs and latent variables.

Findings

This study provides some theoretical contributions to expand the extant literature on the domain of SCPMs. First, the findings determine that multidimensional measures of flexibility, diversity, agility, inventory efficiency, redundancy and robustness are appropriate for measuring food SC performance in disruptions during the COVID-19 emergency. Besides, this study enriches the existing literature on SC disruption by providing extensive empirical evidence on SCPMs in disruptions during the COVID-19 emergency. Finally, this research provides an integrated empirical model that explores the link between the identified food SCPMs to FSCS and SCP.

Originality/value

The contributions may be of interest to business practitioners, business leaders and academics. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence to demonstrate that food SC performance, as measured by these measures, is strongly related to the firm's food supply chain resilience. This is the novel contribution of this study to the current literature on food SC management. Furthermore, this study provides further empirical evidence demonstrating the partial mediating role of the firm's food supply chain resilience in the nexus between food SC performance and SCP. The unique contribution of this study is an extension of the body of knowledge of SC management literature from a comprehensive approach by providing a proven set of performance measures of SC management to which it can drive SC resilience and SCP for food manufacturing SMEs in an emerging economy that hardly found in the current literature.

Research on Extension Design of Emergency Cold Chain Logistics from the Perspective of Carbon Constraints

Extenics has unique advantages in solving contradictions by using formal models to explore the possibility of expanding things and the laws and methods of development and innovation. This paper studies the specific application of the extension strategy generation method in emergency cold chain logistics, in order to solve the problem that the emergency plan is difficult to cover in the face of an emergency. The purpose of this paper is to provide ideas for the generation of strategies to solve the contradictions of cold chain logistics in complex emergency scenarios. Giving full play to the unique advantages of extenics in solving contradictory problems, this paper analyzes the core problems, objectives and conditions of emergency cold chain logistics in four links with the case scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, extends and generates 10 measures to form 36 schemes, and evaluates the combination schemes quantitatively and objectively using the dependent function and superiority evaluation formula. In addition, the consideration of carbon constraints is added to the selection of the scheme, and the specific plan of integrating e-commerce platform, expert guidance, establishing temporary cold storage transfer and contactless distribution is designed. The research results provide support for meeting the needs of emergency logistics schemes in different situations and optimizing the energy efficiency of the scheme while ensuring humanitarian support. At the same time, the application of extenics basic-element formal language also provides a reference for further applying artificial intelligence to the design of emergency logistics schemes.

Development and Validation of a Measurement Instrument for Sustainability in Food Supply Chains

The purpose of this paper is to develop a measurement instrument for sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) critical factors, practices and performance and validate it in the food industry. A literature review was conducted in order to identify pertinent variables and propose relevant measuring items. An email survey was carried out in 423 Greek companies in the food and beverage sector. The questionnaire was sent by e-mail in the Google Forms format and it was requested to be answered by a representative of the company. The collected data was processed using exploratory factor analysis in order to extract the latent constructs of the SSCM critical factors, practices and performance measures. The validity of the proposed instrument was confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis. The extracted SSCM critical factors are “firm-level sustainability critical factors” and “supply chain sustainability critical factors”. The extracted SSCM practices are “supply chain collaboration” and “supply chain strategic orientation”. The extracted SSCM performance factors are “economic performance”, “social performance” and “environmental performance”. The three developed constructs constitute a measurement instrument that can be used both by practitioners who desire to implement SSCM and by researchers who can apply the proposed scales in other research projects or use them as assessment tools.