Arshinder Kaur

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.

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.

Firms today are striving to adopt innovations to ensure their survival, value creation and success. Innovation is increasingly seen as an outcome of a collaborative process, involving various stakeholders both within and outside the firms, in supply chain relationships. Collaborative arrangements are gaining traction and the focus of innovation is shifting from firms to their supply chain networks. This leads to the notion of supply chain innovation, which has been widely accepted as an important ingredient for improving the organisational and supply chain performance of firms. Inefficient practices such as improper crop selection, involvement of too many intermediaries, flood irrigation, over-fertilization and food waste necessitate innovative practices that will improve the sustainability of the food supply chain. In this regard, there is a need to investigate how collaboration among food supply chain entities leads to innovative practices and how these innovative practices in turn improve the sustainability of the food supply chain. This study aims to address this gap using the case of the Indian Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs). Further, using the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model, the supply chain of FPO is divided into five levels - plan, source, make, deliver and return and the case is analysed across these levels. The findings show that the formation of FPO through collaboration facilitates many innovative practices that result in several economic, environmental and social benefits to the FPO.