Fresh food supplier selection for global retail chains via bipolar neutrosophic methodology

Abstract

Due to increases in world population, rapid urbanization, increasing environmental pollution, and poorly managed food supply chains (FSCs), supplying clean and reliable agri-food has become more critical. Furthermore, increasing concerns of the urban population on healthy and balanced nutrition have increased their demand for fresh foods (FFs). Also, the retail industry has become the leading sector responding to almost all requirements of individuals, including FFs. Heightened awareness of individuals on health, reliability, and quality forces retail chains to provide more qualified, sustainable, and reliable FFs for their customers. Retail chains try to construct and manage well-structured global fresh food supply chains (FFSCs) to respond to customers' needs satisfactorily. Thus, selecting logistics service providers performing FF logistics operations (i.e., cold transportation, warehousing, and other logistics activities) from farms to retailers is essential for reliable and sustainable FFSCs. Because FFSCs are pretty sensitive, and minor mistakes or delinquency may cause severe costs.Global retail chains, in particular, only focus on meeting short-term demand and not on a sustainable fresh food supplier selection; fresh food suppliers are essential to determine sustainability performance. In this context, a more holistic approach is needed, focusing not only on the global retail chain level's direct impacts but also on the positive impacts at the overall system level. While this study fills a gap, it also assesses the long-term and lasting impact of choosing a fresh food supplier.In addition, the impacts of logistics service providers on FFSCs' overall performance have not been addressed adequately in the relevant literature. This work aims to analyze the factors identified by the extended form of the Delphi method developed in the present article, influencing the selection of logistics service providers producing logistics services for fresh fruits and vegetables with the BN-VIKOR procedure. The paper's main significant finding is that the logistics firms' service capacity is the determinative and most influential factor. The current study provides insights and beneficial road maps to the practitioners and decision-makers in retailing industry to structure FFSCs. The results contribute to the literature on criteria for selecting sustainable fresh food suppliers in global retail chains and identify strategies and improvement opportunities that can lead to improvement in practice.