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Fresh food cold supply chains (CSCs) feature high fresh food quality and safety, high energy consumption, and poor economic and environmental sustainability. Sustainable management of fresh food CSCs is critical. However, limited research has addressed the implementation of systematic good practices in sustainable fresh food CSCs in developing countries. Consequently, decision-makers lack empirical evidence to help them understand how companies successfully implement systematic good practices and how those good practices affect sustainability performance. This paper formulates a hybrid analytic hierarchy process-fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (AHP-Fuzzy TOPSIS) decision framework to systematically explore the impact of good practices on the sustainability performance of fresh food CSCs in the context of a developing country such as China. The results of the integrated methodology show that China's CSC industry pays more attention to economic sustainability and that employee training is the most impactful good practice for improving the sustainability performance of fresh food CSCs. • A systematic study of good practice and sustainability performance indicators. • A fresh food CSC sustainability performance assessment framework applied in China. • Order of importance of sustainability performance assessment indicators. • Ranking of good practices to improve fresh food CSC sustainability performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-carbon production is key to both economic and environmental sustainability. It is, however, inadequate to meet the low-carbon targets by the manufacturing industry alone. Current research on emission reduction targets mainly at individual optimality, with little consideration of the synergistic benefits achievable through coordination among supply chain players. This paper fills this gap by incorporating Pareto improvement to ensure that all members are likely to gain in emission reduction through coordination. It gives the emission-dependent manufacturers theoretical basis and managerial insights to go through the stringent emission-limited market, especially under a new proposed low-carbon policy of flexible cap-and-trade, which will soon be deployed for emissions trading in China. This flexible cap-and-trade policy aligns emission reduction with capacity adjustments, but its impact has rarely been investigated. Considering the complexity of the supply chain structure, this paper simplifies the problem to two stages: manufacturer and retailer. While the demand uncertainty is considered with Newsvendor models, Stackelberg game is exploited to solve this problem with three contracts, namely revenue sharing, cost sharing, and two-part tariff. Analytical and numerical studies show that the profitability and greenness of the supply chain are increased by coordination with revenue sharing and two-part tariff contracts. The Pareto improvement encourages cooperation between the supply chain members. Managerial insights are given to help emission-dependent manufacturers compete in the increasingly stringent low-carbon environment. The novelty of this paper lies in the investigation of synergistic benefits achievable through coordination under the new flexible cap-and-trade emission policy, and the Pareto-improving conditions with several contracts are analyzed by Newsvendor models. • Synergistic benefits achievable through different contracts are discussed. • It first analyzes the supply chain coordination problem under flexible cap-and-trade. • Green awareness and demand uncertainty are considered. • It targets to improve profitability and sustainability under emission restrictions. • TPT and RSC can coordinate the supply chain, but CSC cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]