Sustainability determinants for food supply chain: developing a qualitative methodology

The increasing push for sustainability has opened up new growth avenues for the corporate sector. It has revitalised hopes to expand the customer base and increase market share even during the global recession. The challenge for supply chains is to develop the concept of sustainability and then operationalise it since every country, industry, company and even brand has its specific and unique requisites for procurement, storage, transportation, production and reverse logistics. However, it is difficult to find a generic model that is able to determine the sustainability requirements for all these stages of various supply chains. Concrete research can be done, using content analysis, to develop a 'qualitative methodology' that could help to elicit valid and reliable 'sustainable supply chain constructs' for the food supply chain. This should be able to be adapted to the specifics of any industry, company, country or brand. This paper will discuss the three phases of a proposed qualitative methodology which would help to determine the basic set of sustainability indicators for specific contexts, merging them with different stages of the supply chain, and finally testing them for reliability and validity.