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Businesses are increasingly striving to become sustainable in terms of economic, environmental and social aspects. However, in the fresh food retail supply chains (SCs), achieving environmental objectives can be challenging because of the unique characteristics of products such as perishability, bulkiness, short product lifecycle and the requirement for cold chain infrastructure. The retail industry is the face of a SC. Therefore, its role in achieving sustainable objectives is pivotal. This study examines the effect of green in-store operations on sustainability performance indicators of fresh food retail and examines the moderating role of organization size in this context.

Data are collected through surveys using self-administered questionnaires from 70 retail stores with 188 completed responses. Data are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Results show a positive relationship between green in-store operation with environmental social and economic performance. Furthermore, these relationships are moderated by the organization size such that the positive green in-store operation and performance relationships are stronger in the case of environmental and social performance only and for larger retail stores. No moderation is seen for economic performance.

The study broadens the understanding of green SC management’s effect on sustainability performance in the retail industry. It shows how the positive implications of a green SC are contingent on organization size and have prominence for environmental and social performance.

Within a Europe highly concerned about becoming a zero net greenhouse gas emission continent, and where the circular economy is strongly promoted as a proper lever in this sense, the present paper aims to raise awareness regarding best practices towards a “green” food retail sector in Romania. In a more specific regard, the “green” practices implemented by the main food retailers acting on the Romanian market are analysed, focusing on what these practices are, how they are measured and how transparent they are.

The paper is based on desk research consisting in the identification and content analysis of the “green”-related information outlined on the food retailers' websites and in their published sustainability reports.

Food retailers are concerned about becoming carbon neutral, implementing the “green” measures outlined in the paper through the lenses of waste management, minimising/eradicating plastic, reducing/eliminating food waste, energy efficiency/saving, water consumption efficiency, protecting biodiversity, transportation efficiency and compliance with standards/obtained certifications/adherence to pacts. In addition to actions, food retailers are concerned about their proper, continuous monitorization, tackling key indicators in four directions: overall impact on the environment, impact on resources, waste impact and transportation impact.

The paper provides a novel, exhaustive best practices guide to encourage the transition to a “greener” activity in the Romanian food retail sector, highlighting both action measures and key assessment indicators.

Interviewing the protagonist and collecting information from secondary resources such as company documents, company and competitor websites, industry reports and online databases like Euromonitor International.

The case explores the metamorphosis of JK Masale from a small-scale family business in India to a regional player. Over a period of six decades, JK Masale (JKM) has emerged against the backdrop of a fiercely competitive spice industry. India, being a confluence of varied regional cultures, poses a diverse consumption pattern. It varies to a great extent with respect to the specific food habits prevalent in each climatic zone of the country. While the brand had successfully captured the Eastern Market and the western market of the country, Mr. Vikash Jain, Managing Director of JK Masale, contemplated to venture in Southern India and introduce new product categories. The case delves into one of the major challenges faced by JKM over the brand architecture and labelling across product categories. Thus, the case provides an excellent opportunity for budding managers to: analyse the company’s performance in the backdrop of a dynamic competitive environment; understand the nature of strategic decision-making and its appropriateness for a small family-owned business; evaluate a brand amongst brands on the architectural framework and select appropriate brand architecture for new products; and understand applicability and risks associated with growth strategies.

The case study can be positioned in both undergraduate and postgraduate level programs for courses on marketing strategy and brand management. Primarily, this case would be ideal to discuss brand relationship and brand architecture in the given context. Instructors have an option to cover concepts like market structure, company analysis, growth strategies and emergent and deliberate strategy through the case.

This study aims to uncover apple preference and consumption in Indonesia, to disclose the risk of non-halal contamination of apples and the importance of maintaining the halal integrity of apples along the supply chain and to uncover the impacts of food miles of apples along supply chain segmentation.

This study adopted mixed research methods under a fully mixed sequential dominant status design (QUAN → qual). Data were collected through a survey in some Indonesian provinces (N = 396 respondents). Samples were collected randomly from individual consumers. The qualitative data were collected through interviews with 15 apple traders in Indonesia. Data were analysed using crosstab, chi-square and descriptive analysis.

First, Muslim consumers believe in the risk of chemical treatment of apples because it can affect the halal status of apples. Second, Indonesian consumers consider the importance of halal certification of chemical-treated apples and the additives for apple treatments. Third, the insignificance of domestic apple preference contributes to longer food miles at the first- and middle-mile stages (preference for imported apples). Fourth, apple consumption and shopping distance contribute to the longer food miles problem at the last-mile stage. Fifth, longer food miles have negative impacts, such as emissions and pollution, food loss and waste, food insecurity, financial loss, slow development of the local economy and food unsafety.

This research has implications for the governments, farmers, consumers (society) and business sectors.

This study proposes a framework of food miles under a halal supply chain (halal food miles) to reduce the risk of food miles and improve halal integrity. The findings from this research have theoretical implications for the development of the food mile theory, halal food supply chain and green supply chain.

This research investigates the impact of customer rule violation issues on frontline employees' (FLEs’) burnout due-to-customers. A model and hypotheses are developed using COR theory and past literature on misbehaving customers and their effects on customer-facing employees.

The proposed model was assessed using a survey of 840 frontline retail, restaurant, service and caregiving employees and their reactions to the issue of misbehaving customers (i.e. rule breaking and/or rude customers).

FLEs' perceived frequency of customer rule violations, FLEs' concerns with misbehaving customers and FLEs' concerns with enforcing rules with these customers increased FLEs' burnout due-to-customers, while FLEs' customer orientation decreased it. Interactions among several antecedents were found relative to their effects on burnout. Burnout due-to-customers decreased FLEs' organizational commitment and increased quitting intentions. Additionally, this burnout mediated the relationships between our studied antecedents and job outcome variables (either partially or fully), with organizational commitment also mediating the relationship between burnout and quitting intentions.

The impact of FLEs' concerns relative to customers' rule breaking, which has not been previously addressed, is shown to increase FLEs' burnout due-to-customers, while FLEs' customer orientation buffered and reduced burnout, with frequency of violations interacting with several antecedents, and ultimately affecting burnout and several dependent variables—organizational commitment and quitting intentions. These FLE rule violation and enforcement concerns, captured at the height of the pandemic, are new variables to the literature. These issues have important implications for managers as to their treatment and training of FLEs in the future.

This study aims to examine the blockchain landscape in supply chain management by drawing insights from academic and industry literature. It identifies the key drivers, categorizes the products involved and highlights the business values achieved by early adopters of blockchain technology within the supply chain domain. Additionally, it explores fingerprinting techniques to establish a robust connection between physical products and the blockchain ledger.

The authors combined the interpretive sensemaking systematic literature review to offer insights into how organizations interpreted their business challenges and adopted blockchain technology in their specific supply chain context; content analysis (using Leximancer automated text mining software) for concept mapping visualization, facilitating the identification of key themes, trends and relationships, and qualitative thematic analysis (NVivo) for data organization, coding and enhancing the depth and efficiency of analysis.

The findings highlight the transformative potential of blockchain technology and offer valuable insights into its implementation in optimizing supply chain operations. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of product provenance information to consumers, with blockchain technology offering certainty and increasing customer loyalty toward brands that prioritize transparency.

This research has several limitations that should be acknowledged. First, there is a possibility that some relevant investigations may have been missed or omitted, which could impact the findings. In addition, the limited availability of literature on blockchain adoption in supply chains may restrict the scope of the conclusions. The evolving nature of blockchain adoption in supply chains also poses a limitation. As the technology is in its infancy, the authors expect that a rapidly emerging body of literature will provide more extensive evidence-based general conclusions in the future. Another limitation is the lack of information contrasting academic and industry research, which could have provided more balanced insights into the technology’s advancement. The authors attributed this limitation to the narrow collaborations between academia and industry in the field of blockchain for supply chain management.

Practitioners recognize the potential of blockchain in addressing industry-specific challenges, such as ensuring transparency and data provenance. Understanding the benefits achieved by early adopters can serve as a starting point for companies considering blockchain adoption. Blockchain technology can verify product origin, enable truthful certifications and comply with established standards, reinforcing trust among stakeholders and customers. Thus, implementing blockchain solutions can enhance brand reputation and consumer confidence by ensuring product authenticity and quality. Based on the results, companies can align their strategies and initiatives with their needs and expectations.

In essence, the integration of blockchain technology within supply chain provenance initiatives not only influences economic aspects but also brings substantial social impacts by reinforcing consumer trust, encouraging sustainable and ethical practices, combating product counterfeiting, empowering stakeholders and contributing to a more responsible, transparent and progressive socioeconomic environment.

This study consolidates current knowledge on blockchain’s capacity and identifies the specific drivers and business values associated with early blockchain adoption in supply chain provenance. Furthermore, it underscores the critical role of product fingerprinting techniques in supporting blockchain for supply chain provenance, facilitating more robust and efficient supply chain operations.

This study aims to investigate the intention of adopting a technological service innovation that is a mix-mode consumer shopping service in the retailing context.

A modified extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) model is tested by using data on a real example named “Mkolay” which is a new mix-mode consumer shopping service. Data are collected from 217 participants and analyzed by using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM).

Research findings show that the customers' intention to use the new mix-mode consumer shopping service is particularly influenced by performance expectations, effort expectations, social influence and personal innovativeness.

In designing a mix-mode consumer shopping service, keeping the design as simple and easy to use as possible seems to increase the intention of adoption. Additionally, collaborating with reference figures or influencers could be instrumental to spread the new service to a wider audience hence increase the likelihood of adoption. Practitioners should also use new technologies in different ways to attract and surprise customers, especially taking into account the technological profile of potential users.

This study contributes to the literature of technological service innovation adoption by revealing the factors affecting the intention of adoption of mix-mode consumer shopping service in the retailing context with a modified UTAUT2 model.

Corona Virus Disease (Covid-19) is a global pandemic that emerged at the end of 2019 and caused disruptions in global supply chains, particularly in the food supply chains that exposed the vulnerability of today’s food supply chain in a major disruption which provided a unique research opportunity. This review explores the current research direction for food supply chain resilience and identifies gaps for future research in preparing for future major global pandemics.

This article presents a review of food supply chain resilience followed a systematic literature review of the business and management-based studies related to the food supply chain in Covid-19 published between December 2019 and December 2021 to identify the immediate issues and responses that need to be addressed in the event of future disruptions in food supply chains due to new global health threats.

The study revealed the need for more literature on food supply chain resilience, particularly resilience to a major global pandemic. The study also uncovered the sequence of events in a major pandemic and identified some strategies for building resilience to potential future risks of such an event.

The limitations of this study are apparent. Firstly, the selection of databases is not comprehensive. Due to time limitations, authoritative publishers such as Springer, Emerald, Wiley and Taylor & Francis were not selected. Secondly, a single author completed the literature quality testing and text analysis, possibly reducing the credibility of the results due to subjective bias. Thirdly, the selected literature are the studies published during the immediate event of Covid-19, and before January 2022, other research studies may have been completed but were still in the state of auditing at this time.

This paper is the first study that provides a detailed classification of the immediate challenges to the food supply chain faced in both upstream and downstream nodes during a major global disruption. For researchers, this clearly shows the immediate difficulties faced at each node of the food supply chain, which provides research topics for future studies.

The research carried out a bibliometric analysis of the literature on environmental sustainability from a demand perspective by analyzing the scientific contributions published in the last twenty years.

A bibliometric analysis was carried out to outline the scientific studies development, identifying the most discussed topics and those that would require future research. In total, 274 articles published between 1999 and 2021 were collected through the Web of Science database and analyzed with the SciMAT software.

By systematizing the literature results, the study revealed a steady growth in the number of publications and in the research areas, highlighting a substantial evolution of the research topic.

The study contribute for conceptual, methodological and thematic development of the topic, systematizing the results of existing studies and providing useful indications for the promotion of sustainable consumer habits.

The study attempts to bridge the gap in current literature by offering a holistic view on the role of consumer behavior in pursuing sustainability goals, identifying both the most treated areas and the emerging ones that can represent opportunities for future research.

This study explores the linkages between various attributes, consequences and values of casino restaurants and the differences in the hierarchical value maps between female and male customers and between casino players and non-casino players.

This study was conducted using the means-end chain (MEC) theory. The data were collected using the hard-laddering method. Two hundred forty-one responses were analyzed.

Attributes such as “taste,” “reasonable prices,” and “discounts” were associated with the values “personal happiness,” “considered,” “life satisfaction,” and “life-quality enhancement” at casino restaurants. Males were found to hold “prompt services” as important when dining at casino restaurants, while females held a “spacious environment” to be critical. Furthermore, “use of casino complimentary credits” was important to casino players, while “free parking” and “comfortable seats” mattered for non-casino players.

It is suggested that casinos add more Asian cuisines in their casino restaurants in Macao to attract customers who value culinary and cultural exploration while simultaneously satisfying tourists from neighboring regions who wish to enjoy familiar foods when they visit Macao. In addition, the authors recommend that casinos develop menu items that can be served quickly to casino players.

This study is based on the MEC theory and broadens the range of studies on casino restaurants. Furthermore, it provides useful information to guide casino restauranteurs in developing their marketing and operational strategies for different customer segments.