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.