sustainability performance analysis for food supply chain processing sector

Increasing food demands, environmental aspects, and massive increase in population have an impact on the sustainability of a supply chain, especially in the food processing sector. in the food supply chain, there are many parameters from production to consumption like resources, packaging, and waste management, etc. that need to be considered for sustainability. the aim of this study is to determine the parameters affecting the sustainability of food supply chain and to measure the sustainability performance of the parameters along the supply chain. it involves the development of sustainability assessment model based on united nations sustainable development goals to assess the sustainability practices and performance in industries. it helps in improvement in all levels in the food industry. this can certainly help local food processing industry of pakistan to optimize their production processes, shrink wastes and increase the productivity. the gap identified that many industries were weak in terms of certain factors leadership and communication, educate and training, food affordability and availability, resource utilization and waste management. the developed sustainability assessment model comprises of three categories namely production, processing, and consumption. to facilitate the above-mentioned categories, the assessment model consists of thirteen factors on which sustainability in industries was assessed. these are: (i) resource utilization (ii) safety of products (iii) technology and innovation (iv) waste management (v) reliability (vi) customer satisfaction (vii) packaging and traceability (viii) food safety and food security (ix) food affordability and availability (x) leadership and communication (xi) educate and training (xii) health and safety (xiii) socio-cultural well-being. a comprehensive questionnaire was developed and conducted from one hundred (100) companies of pakistan and the data was analyzed by reliability and validity test. descriptive statistics, anova with friedman's test and co-relation analysis was done to deeply investigate the results. as-is and to-be model has been developed to check the current and future state of the research model. the performance score for each dimension was calculated via analytic hierarchy process. safety of products has been calculated to have the highest performance, with a score of 73.75 in sustainable food supply chain management performance evaluation, followed by the customer satisfaction 72.196%, food safety and food security, at 72.16%, while the performance index score of the reliability is 70.91%, that of the packaging and traceability is 68.41%, while as resource utilization and waste management are the least performed indicators. the results of this study include feedback on parameters in the food chain from agriculture to consumers. the sustainable food supply chain performance evaluation for the food processing sector in pakistan indicates that it has an overall performance of 65.5 %.