This paper is in closed access until 30th June 2018.Sustainability of agro-food supply chains has recently become the subject of greater interest from consumers, firms, governmental organizations and academia as the environment continues to deteriorate. One of the most critical factors influencing the sustainability of an agro-food supply chain is its network design. A particularly challenging aspect in this context is the broad range of influencing indicators associated with the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) of sustainability that need to be considered. However, many of these indicators could not be fully integrated or measured by single-step optimization problems. This paper presents a critical literature review of operational research methods for the design of sustainable supply chains. A novel two-stage hybrid solution methodology is proposed. In the first stage, a partner selection is performed using a hybrid multi criteria decision making based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) aggregation method. The result obtained in the first stage is used in the second stage to develop a multi-objective mathematical model to optimize the design of the supply chain network. This approach allows the simultaneous consideration of all three dimensions of sustainability including carbon footprint, water footprint, number of jobs created and the total cost of the supply chain design. The proposed approach generates a Pareto frontier to aid users in making decisions. Numerical experiments are completed utilizing data from a case study of French agro-food company to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the solution method. The analyses of the numerical results provide important organizational, practical and policy insights on (1) the impact of financial and environmental sustainability on supply chain network design (2) the use of environmental emission, water footprint, societal and cost tradeoff analysis for making informed decision on supply chain investment

Food chain logistics plays an important role in the sustainability performance of the food sector. Therefore, project SCALE (Step Change in Agri-food Logistics Ecosystems) started as a collaborative international project, aiming for tools and frameworks for the food sector to make a step change in operational practices. A sustainability framework is introduced to propose a structured and rational method for assessing sustainability. Next, we empirically apply the framework, based upon explorative web-based research and semi-structured interviews with the best practice players in the field in the Netherlands, the UK and France. Findings provide clear insights into the current state of the art regarding the use of sustainability performance indicators, companies’ sustainability strategies, supply chain redesign strategies currently applied in practice and experienced barriers to sustainability improvement. Overall, logistics service providers seem to have a wait-and-see attitude towards sustainability where food companies are more proactive following market demands for more sustainable products.

This paper analyzes supply chain crisis, the main blockage to effective supply chain collaboration. The research question of this article refers to how the two collaboration concepts (vertical and horizontal) in supply chain can be influenced in practice by potential risk factors. This research proposes five alternatives for a good collaboration: Information sharing collaboration, Decision synchronization collaboration, Incentive alignment collaboration, Resource and skill sharing collaboration, Knowledge Management collaboration. After a thorough research and detailed discussions, the authors identified 16 risk factors most present in literature. The research methodology was combined with the application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP)