How do food supply chain performance measures contribute to sustainable corporate performance during disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic emergency?

Abstract

PurposeThis study aims to the development of the scale of supply chain performance measures (SCPMs), food supply chain resilience (FSCS) and sustainable corporate performance (SCP) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in an emerging market. Based on this purpose, the study examines the relationships between SCPMs and SCP by exploring the mediating role of FSCS in emerging markets.Design/methodology/approachBased on a comprehensive literature review on the SCPMs, FSCS and SCP, the author evaluates the nexus of these constructs on disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency in an emerging market. The article follows a quantitative approach. A total of 567 valid responses from managers at senior and middle levels were received and used for data analysis. The Smart PLS version 3.3.2 was employed to analyse Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to investigate the relationships between constructs and latent variables.FindingsThis study provides some theoretical contributions to expand the extant literature on the domain of SCPMs. First, the findings determine that multidimensional measures of flexibility, diversity, agility, inventory efficiency, redundancy and robustness are appropriate for measuring food SC performance in disruptions during the COVID-19 emergency. Besides, this study enriches the existing literature on SC disruption by providing extensive empirical evidence on SCPMs in disruptions during the COVID-19 emergency. Finally, this research provides an integrated empirical model that explores the link between the identified food SCPMs to FSCS and SCP.Originality/valueThe contributions may be of interest to business practitioners, business leaders and academics. In addition, this study provides empirical evidence to demonstrate that food SC performance, as measured by these measures, is strongly related to the firm's food supply chain resilience. This is the novel contribution of this study to the current literature on food SC management. Furthermore, this study provides further empirical evidence demonstrating the partial mediating role of the firm's food supply chain resilience in the nexus between food SC performance and SCP. The unique contribution of this study is an extension of the body of knowledge of SC management literature from a comprehensive approach by providing a proven set of performance measures of SC management to which it can drive SC resilience and SCP for food manufacturing SMEs in an emerging economy that hardly found in the current literature.