Sustainable supply chain management practices through the monitoring and the control of suppliers: An exploratory study of the large food retailing in Belgium

The food retailing sector occupies an important place in society and affects the entire population. Therefore, large food retailers have an extremely important role to play in ensuring economic, social and environmental sustainability throughout their supply chain from raw material to finished product. The objective of this thesis is to analyze and assess the sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices through the monitoring and the control of the suppliers used by large food retailers in Belgium. The first section of this work reviews seven tools or methods applied by retailers to ensure the sustainability of their supply chains. The second section focuses on the different corporate sustainability approaches adopted by these companies, namely local production, private labels, and transparency and traceability, and analyze them according to Seuring and Müller (2008) SSCM strategies framework. Finally, the ultimate purpose is to compare the three main categories of large food retailers (mainstream supermarkets, the hard discounters, and the hybrids) in terms of the approaches they focus on. Based on scientific literature as well as desktop and field studies, the findings show that audits on the one hand and norms, standards and certifications on the other hand are the most effective tools and methods to ensure the sustainability of the supply chain of large food retailers in Belgium but "soft" monitoring tools such as trust and collaborative or cooperative actions are also used in the relationship between the supplier and the retailer. Currently no single tool is perfectly suitable, but it is the combination of several tools and methods that proves to be the most optimal solution. With regard to the SSCM strategies defined by Seuring, the results highlight that the practices implemented by the companies are more product-oriented than supplier-oriented and therefore follow an "SCM for sustainable products" strategy. In the end, regarding the different sustainability approaches of retailers, hard discounters have an advantage over private labels, mainstream supermarkets are more advanced in terms of transparency and traceability while hybrid models fall somewhere in between. However, the initiatives recently set up mainly concern tier-1 suppliers and their own brands. As a result, large food retailers in Belgium are still far from being able to ensure the sustainability of their entire supply chain.