The identification of key success factors in sustainable cold chain management: Insights from the Indian food industry

Supply chain sustainability has emerged as an indispensable research agenda for the government, industry as well as non-profit orientation bodies. As a developing country, cold supply chain management in India is still in infancy. The demand pattern of food products has been dramatically changing since last few years. Nowadays, the customers are more conscious to use products for better health and highly expecting for food safety, toxic free and eco-friendly delivery of food products.  However, sustainable cold supply chain has not yet received good heed throughout the world. Hence, in this paper an attempt has been made to address these important issues. A conceptual model was proposed in the consultation of practitioners and literature support to address the important issues in cold supply chain management for food companies.  Therefore, in order to identify the key success factors for sustainable cold chain management, in this study a conceptual model developed. The proposed framework is then validated by an empirical research in the Indian food industry. This research has several alarming findings. Explicitly, in India i) environmental issues and social responsibility are not as important as other ‎economical supplier selection criteria, ii) among 19 food supplier selection criteria, the rank of social responsibility is 18‎, iii) low carbon emission is less important value addition trait as compare to ‎other sustainable cold chain value addition (which means in India the buyers focus more on their individual and prompt received ‎benefits rather than long ‎lasting advantages), iv) the use of life cycle analysis, renewable energy sources and passive cold chain are the least important ‎implemented sustainable cold chain practices (although this might be because of utilization complexities), v) the joint development of product is implemented at the lowest extent judging against other dynamic capacity ‎factors, vii) government usually backed the firms to adopt and implementing sustainability in their operations, but ‎training courses that will guide how to achieve sustainability are less as their requirement, and viii) business sustainability builds the trust among the government, suppliers, firm and all ‎stakeholders that build strong cold chain relationships.‎