Sustainability implementation challenges in food supply chains: A case of UK artisan cheese producers

Food supply chains are receiving increased attention due to the rapid depletion of natural resources, increasing quality standards and rising food safety and security concerns regarding contamination and fraud. Implementing sustainability practices in food supply chains is believed to overcome emerging challenges at both regional and global levels. However, limited studies address sustainability implementation concerns particularly in cold food supply chains. This study aims to contribute to this evident research gap by addressing the major factors hindering sustainability implementation in these networks by considering a case of UK artisan supply chain. Survey data from the UK artisan cheese producers are utilized to identify and prioritise barriers for implementing sustainability following a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and sensitivity analysis. The analysis identified several key barriers including initial investment cost, firm size and unawareness of government regulations. The internal barriers significantly dominate implementation of sustainability practices in comparison to the external barriers. Lack of consensus regarding the concept of sustainability by different stakeholders was observed to be an issue negatively affecting the level of integration in SMEs. The findings will be highly useful for food and dairy SME's to gain competitive advantage through the successful implementation of sustainability practices