Supply chain sustainability assessment of the U.S. food manufacturing sectors: A life cycle-based frontier approach

•Supply chain sustainability assessment of the U.S. food manufacturing sectors is studied.•A joint research method that consists of EIO-LCA and Data Envelopment Analysis is utilized.•Supply chains of food manufacturing are found to have over 80% impact share on the environment.•More than half of the food manufacturing sectors are not efficient in terms of sustainability performance.•Forestry is found as the most sensitive environmental indicator on the sustainability performance of food manufacturing sectors.

Due to the fact that food manufacturing is one of the major drivers of the global environmental issues, there is a strong need to focus on sustainable manufacturing toward achieving long-term sustainability goals in food production of the United States. In this regard, current study assessed the direct and indirect environmental footprint of 33 U.S. food manufacturing sectors by using the Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) model. Then, a non-parametric mathematical optimization tool, namely Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), is utilized to benchmark the sustainability performance of food manufacturing sectors by using the results of the EIO-LCA model. Next, sustainability performance indices (SPIs), rankings, target improvements, and sensitivity of environmental impact indicators are presented. The average SPI score of U.S. food manufacturing sectors is found as 0.76. In addition, 19 out of 33 food sectors are found as inefficient where an average of 45–71% reduction is indicated for various environmental impact categories. Analysis results also indicate that supply chains of food manufacturing sectors are heavily responsible for the impacts with over 80% shares for energy, water and carbon footprint, fishery and grazing categories. Especially, animal (except poultry) slaughtering, rendering and processing sector is found as the most dominant sector in most of the impact categories (ranked as 2nd in fishery and forest land). Sensitivity analysis indicated that forest land footprint is found to be the most sensitive environmental indicator on the overall sustainability performance of food manufacturing sectors.