Environmental hotspots analysis: A systematic framework for food supply chains and implementation case in the UK poultry industry

Environmental sustainability analyses of end-to-end food supply chain (SC) operations need to be per -formed regularly to accommodate reconfiguration opportunities arising in the global business landscape. This research scrutinises the pertinent literature and identifies the challenges of data availability, data obsolescence, computational complexity, and data specificity that associate to well-established envi-ronmental assessment methodologies, and proposes a stepwise approach that considers key players and processes for generating "close to real-time snapshots" of the main environmental hotspots for the focus firm. The applicability of the proposed systematic approach is demonstrated via an implementation at a resource-intensive sector of significant scale, i.e., the UK poultry industry. Overall, this research con-tributes to the SC environmental sustainability management domain by guiding the mapping and identification of environmental hotspots across end-to-end networks of operations in the form of a stepwise framework, and through articulating several research propositions. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.