Enhancing the sustainability of food waste management practices in emerging economies’ hospitality industry through SECA multi-criteria group decision-making

Food waste poses a critical challenge to human flourishing, especially in emerging economies. However, sustainable food waste management in these nations neglect downstream retail and consumer management. Considering the increasing demand for hospitality and tourism services in these nations, this neglect is a major shortcoming. So, this paper examines the barriers to sustainable food waste management practices in an emerging economy. We proposed a novel linguistic distribution assessment simultaneous evaluation of criteria and alternatives (LDA-SECA) multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) model to optimize the practices and barriers. Analyzing experts’ assessment, we found food waste recovery practice faces the greatest implementation challenge followed by recycling, and reuse. The results further revealed that financial and economic problems constitute the greatest barrier to sustainable food waste management followed by technical difficulties, socio-cultural disadvantages, ineffective communication and information sharing, inappropriate regulation and legislation framework, and human resources limitation. These findings have been discussed thoroughly.