Designing sustainable processed food supply chain: A resiliency strategy of horizontal cooperation

The food supply chain requires special attention due to its importance in people's lives, its environmental and social effects, and the numerous sources of uncertainty it involves. Managers are worried about balancing sustainability and resilience goals in the event of a disruption. This article's model combines sustainability and resilience indicators. The amount of CO2 emissions and wastewater treatment are considered environmental indicators. Job creation, regional development, and employee health are regarded as social indicators. The model objectives to maintain resilience by using three strategies: increasing capacity, developing horizontal cooperation in the food industry for the first time, and backup suppliers. Finally, the presented model has been evaluated and implemented using data from the food industry with the Rolling Time Horizon algorithm. The simulation results suggest that among the resilience policies, the horizontal cooperation strategy has eliminated the negative competition between the production centers and improved income by 63.5% under disruption conditions, while also reducing lost sales by 26.82%. A 9% increase in construction costs is a result of the construction of a water treatment plant from an environmental perspective. In exchange, there is a 7% reduction in the cost of buying fresh water. In the social dimension, constructing a distribution center led to an 11% increase in employment, of which 4% was attributed to transportation in the chain, and with a 12% increase in regional development compared to current conditions. The results presented above demonstrate that the combination of resilience and sustainability is a key factor in improving chain performance.