Comparative analysis on beverage store owners towards sustainable packaging using multicriteria decision techniques

In recent years, the food and beverage industry has been experiencing rapid growth. The consumption of plastic or Styrofoam cups also grew with the observed market growth. In Canada, an approximate CAD $147.12 million worth of plastic cups and lids are produced yearly but only 9% end up being recycled. Therefore, there is a growing need for a more sustainable beverage packaging. To analyze if such decisions are warranted in small to medium sized café in the Philippines, the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods such as ELECTRE III and TOPSIS will be used in this research. With the data of both storeowner and supplier perspective, it was found that quality has the most affect at 36.3% followed by the availability of sizes at 32.6%. As it turns out, the result of this study favored the more plastic-oriented traditional cups and lids. Even though the initial hypothesis favored the more sustainable packaging, the analysis and methodology were still successfully carried out. Thus, prompting the importance of future research regarding the pursuit of sustainable packaging.


Introduction
In recent years, the food and beverage industry has been experiencing rapid growth.Pre-COVID its expected growth was around 8.5% in 2019 and an additional 8% in 2020 for the Philippines [1], with the beverage chains taking up 17% of the market share alone [2].In beverage chains disposable plastic or Styrofoam cups are commonly used, in Canada alone, around $147.12 million Canadian Dollars' worth of plastic cups and lids are produced yearly [3].However, only 9% will be recycled and a majority around 79% will end up in landfills, taking an average of 80 to 100 years or more to decompose [4].This method of disposal highlights the need for sustainable solutions to packaging for every beverage chain present in the market currently.
Sustainable packaging is one of the alternatives to all single use or disposable cups in the market, and beverage chains are starting to shift towards this goal to achieve environmental sustainability.Since manufacturing of these items would cost more than regular plastic cups, it does not look feasible to most beverage chains in the market since it would incur more cost in their material supply.However, in a survey it reports 73% of beverage consumers do not mind paying extra for sustainable packaging solutions [5].The population accounts for those living in high-income countries which have the capability of shifting to sustainable solutions, unlike in middle-income countries like the Philippines.The Philippines have also entered the uptrend of different beverage industries in the country despite the presence of the pandemic.It is projected that in 2022 the Food and Beverage service industry will experience a 12% to 16% growth since most businesses have started to reopen amid the pandemic [6].Hence, the consumption of different food and beverages will increase as well.

Purpose
The general purpose of this study aims to promote sustainable consumption of beverage packaging.This research aims to apply the 12 th Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns.Accounting for the predictions in growth in the food and beverage industry in the Philippines, a trend towards sustainable packaging materials can be started early.Sustainable materials such as bamboo or paper, are aimed to be recommended alternative materials in comparison to the traditional type of packaging.
Following the purpose of applying more sustainable beverage packaging consumption, the specific purpose of the study is to identify the buying habits of beverage store owners regarding sustainable packaging.This study can be applied to recognize the factors affecting their preferences and how sustainable beverage packaging can be improved to meet the needs of the food beverage owners, for it to be more ideal than the traditional type of packaging.

Objectives
The objectives of this study are as follows, a.To identify the different factors of beverage packaging that affect preference.b.To identify the specific characteristics of each factor for different packaging suppliers.c.To identify the beverage packaging supplier that buyers would generally choose given the set of criteria.

Scope and Eliminations
The study will only focus on beverage packaging for drinks such as coffee and milk tea and will not include food packaging for its variety of shapes and sizes.Meanwhile, the experts from the beverage industry considered in the study will be owners and employee in charge of the beverage stores in the Philippines.Since, MCDM technique only involves a small sample size, it is important that the group of experts are within the same environment setting in the beverage market.Thus, the researchers interviewed owners and employees of small to medium size café and shops within Pasig City.

Review of Related Literature
It has been discovered that disposable cups are one of the major contributors of all waste found in large bodies of water.Thus, sustainable solutions are used, and multiple alternatives are introduced.The weak characteristics of paper holding water make it difficult for beverage sellers to use paper cups.Thus, utilization of Biopolymers and petroleum-based coatings allows it to be more durable when holding liquids.However, based on the comprehensive review of [7], neither of the alternatives were able to be deemed as most environmentally friendly due to its end of life and waste management aspect.Despite its issues with end-of-life cycle, it is still more sustainable than using traditional cups.
According to a study by [8], they have introduced three alternatives replacing single use cups which are refundable cups, bring your own cup, and reduction of order on the go.Results showed that awareness, environmental responsibility, and other positive behaviors towards achieving the goals have increased.In addition, it showed that there is a significant impact and association with regards to the intention to switch to other alternatives than single use cups.This study showed the feasibility of reduction of single use cups in the beverage industry.However, it does not show the perception on owners of beverage stores perspective towards the shift to sustainable solutions since owners will be the main decision makers towards the shift.
Authors in [9] were able to identify 10 barriers of corporate owners when it comes to shifting to sustainable packaging.Those are, Legislation, Organizational motivation, cost, resources, internal communication, supplier interaction, performance measurement of alternative, process change, adoption procedure, and training.Thus, it becomes difficult for the decision makers to change immediately to alternatives.In this study, the researchers would like to assess the decision makers of the beverage industry regarding the different criteria they consider when choosing a sustainable packaging for their stores.Furthermore, the study will utilize MCDM techniques, specifically, ELECTRE and TOPSIS.ELECTRE is an MCDM technique that allows users to outrank all alternatives, and its main advantage is the ability to consider many alternatives and variables.Moreover, it does not outweigh completely the value of all criteria.Meaning even if criteria have low weight value.It will still be equally considered as higher weights.For those reasons, this is highly used in making decisions about sustainable solutions, and environmental decisions [10].Hence, this MCDM technique will be utilized in this study.Moreover, ELECTRE has been used for calculating production of products.
According to the study of [11] they used the ELECTRE III, concept an outranking concept of the ELECTRE Family, to select the best Enriched pasta production using Opuntia as an ingredient.The study evaluated different proportions and combinations of Opuntia and main ingredients of the pasta to achieve the quality they require.The main criteria used are the physical characteristics of the pasta, the humidity, and the structural component of the pasta.As we can see here all the criteria need to be met so that they can ensure the quality without compromising the sustainable production of the pasta.Thus, we will use a similar approach when it comes to selecting a sustainable packaging for beverage business owners.
TOPSIS on the other hand uses a Euclidean distance concept where Alternatives are measured in calculating its distance from non-ideal to ideal solution.Thus, like ELECTRE III, its approach to MCDM is more stable since chosen alternatives are not completely affected by the weights of criteria.Hence, it can be used to many alternatives and criteria unlike other techniques.Moreover, it is also dependable when it comes to sustainability analysis [12].
Based on the study of [13] in the food production in the Philippines.It is assessed and an optimized solution was found for finding a sustainable manufacturing strategy for the food sector of the country.The study utilized a combination of Fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS since both methods give their advantages when it comes to MCDM techniques.The result shows that content strategy and Total Quality Management are the practices that the food sector can focus on to achieve sustainable manufacturing practice in the country.For this study, decision experts are business owners sourcing packaging products for their own.Thus, the AHP technique will not be a good combination for methodology since it completely relies on the weights of each criterion due to its straightforward solution.Thus, the study would like to utilize both ELECTRE III and TOPSIS because both techniques can make all alternatives stable despite the differences of weights of each criterion.
Finally, sustainability has three domains which are environment (ENV), economy (ECO), and society (SOC) [14].Even though it is ideal to achieve this, it should be that in every sustainable solution at least, meet a certain objective in each domain.In the perspective of business owners, it can be said that their main priority is more aligned in the economic domain.Thus, the criteria of this study will mostly consist of items that are in line with economic factors.

Criteria Considered
According to [15], there are four main factors that could affect sourcing packaging materials.The factors mentioned in the research are lead time, supplier selection, logistic management, and transport infrastructure.The research then further breaks down each factor into several components which have been summarized in Table 1  Price will be one of the considering factors for every owner when it comes to packaging, since packaging accounts for one of the largest sources of material costs in a given industry [15].In addition, Price is chosen as it is one of their ways to formulate competitive market pricing, especially since their line of business is popular to consumers.Furthermore, Quality and Green Design capability has also been considered as one of the factors affecting supplier selection [15].
Quality, assess the overall performance of the packaging materials.It assesses how it will be compatible with the contents it will be used of which in this case the beverages.Furthermore, it also talks about the durability performance of the product.In this study, the two indicators of quality and durability will be separated since both can be measured in different ways.Meanwhile, Green Design Capability is the ability of suppliers to incorporate environmental impact on their design.Thus, helping the product to be more environmentally sustainable.
Moving onto the sub-factor of logistic management, one of which will be the lead time which talks about the delivery of the products once they have been ordered.Thus, the study needs to consider the time for the packaging supply to be delivered to the owners.In addition, the inventory accuracy of suppliers is considered as well since availability of sizes will be crucial for the store owners.Availability of all sizes in beverage stores is a marketing advantage for owners since it caters to a wide range of customer preferences.Overall, the chosen factors for the questionnaires and research for this study are price, quality, availability of sizes, green design capability or environmental impact, location of Supplier, minimum order, and response Time.

Methodology
The overall methodology of the paper is reflected in Figure 1 below.As mentioned in the objectives, the paper aims to assess the different factors regarding beverage packaging that affect the preferences of buyers.The criteria being assessed are Price, Quality, Availability of Sizes, Environmental Impact, Location of Supplier, Minimum Order, and Response Time.The paper aims to identify which criteria are important and prioritized by the beverage store owners.This will provide an overview of large-scale consumer behavior and will highlight if the criteria do have any bearing in their decision making.Two questionnaires are created, one for the beverage store owners and one for the suppliers.Responses are collected from surveys and from phone calls.Using the response weights given from the participants to aid in identifying which type of packaging from the various suppliers is most likely to be chosen by the buyers based on them.The responses would then be utilized in both ELECTRE III and TOPSIS.The answers given by the store owners will be utilized for the weights of the criteria while those from the suppliers will be used as the values of alternatives.After setting up the table for the two types of analysis, the researchers would calculate the results of the two Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Approaches and later compare the findings.The reasoning behind the two surveys is that the data collected from the beverage store owners would be used as the values to be assessed for the multicriteria analyses of both TOPSIS and ELECTRE III.The responses to the survey for the latter type of group, which are those who buy the packaging for their stores, will be used as the basis for the weights of each of the criteria to provide a more accurate analysis.

Packaging Supplier Survey
For the packaging supplier, the researchers will obtain information on pricing, availability of sizes, location of warehouse or stores, minimum order number, and their response time with the orders.The researchers will get the required data from the supplier's website or by directly calling them.All the information gathered will be utilized as values in the cells for the matrix.

Beverage Store Owner Survey
The second survey will assess the importance of each of the criteria to beverage store owners.The questions will be listed in Table 2

ELECTRE III Analysis
As shown in the Process chart in Figure 1, normalizing the performance matrix is done prior to the calculation of the concordance and discordance index.The normalization allows each measure to be standardized and be equal with other criteria making it unbiased for each criterion.Furthermore, in the Normalization process, the Weight of each criterion is introduced and prioritized by the experts of the study.Meanwhile, the Concordance and Discordance matrix represents the superiority and inferiority index of each alternative, as shown in Figure 3.
The index is detrimental when calculating the final rankings of each alternative based on the calculated Aggregate as shown in Figure 2. Furthermore, Using the indexes will also help us calculate the Net Superiority and Inferiority value of each alternative making a cross-check of all ranks performed in ELECTRE III.

TOPSIS Analysis
The researchers also utilized another MCDM tool called TOPSIS which is short for Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution.Unlike the ELECTRE III discussed in the previous part of the paper, which was stated to be an outranking method, this is a ranking method.Rather than utilizing a pairwise comparison to identify the strong and weakest alternative relative to the criteria, TOPSIS identifies the strong and weakest alternative relative to the best one.Rather than being outranked completely based on the given set of measures, alternatives are able to make up for their weakness in TOPSIS.As shown in Figure 4 below, TOPSIS utilizes the same steps on the first parts as the ELECTRE III until the normalized decision matrix is made.After that, the process also branches into two which are the identification of the positive and negative ideal solutions.In this part, distinguishing the ideal solution either to maximize or minimize the value is done.An example of this is for the price since the lower is better for this criterion, minimizing the value is to be done by identifying the least value as the ideal solution.On the other hand, the availability of sizes and quality are to be maximized therefore the highest value among different alternatives is to be deemed as the ideal solution.At the end, the TOPSIS will yield a relative closeness coefficient for each of the alternatives which simply equates to how close the alternative is to the ideal values for all the criteria.The higher the coefficient is, the more ideal it is, which will be the basis of the final ranking.3. The data were obtained from 7 experts in 5 beverage stores throughout Pasig City, stores vary from milk tea shop to café and even the combination of both beverages.Thus, the experts can rate and at the same time give insights on the different sustainable packaging present in the market.
The computer weight shows that quality is the most significant criteria when it comes to choosing a supplier for sustainable packaging.Meanwhile the least important is the minimum order that can be made to the supplier.The output of the least prioritized criteria is logically correct since the trend of this beverage is still increasing through the years.Price and Location of the Supplier where able to tie at 6% since both criteria incurs cost to the owners.For instance, if the location of the supplier is too far, then travel expenses will affect cost and needs to be accounted for when thinking about prices.Overall, the results of the weights turn out to be coherent with the situation of the market café and milk tea shops.

Matrix
For the matrix shown in Table 4, each of the values of the alternatives in every criterion was obtained through different methods.As mentioned in the methodology, the researchers gathered information from the packaging suppliers for the criteria of price, availability of sizes, location, minimum order, and response time.All of these were from the websites or online portals of the respective suppliers of packaging type.Most of the data were utilized raw for the matrix other than the location.For this specific one, the researchers had to compute the distance in time from the warehouse or packaging supplier store to the area where the beverage stores are located.
The researchers only set one endpoint for all which is the entrance of the village wherein all the beverage stores are located.The values for the quality were averages of the sum of two fivepoint Likert scale which assesses the beverage store owners' perspective on the durability and overall impact of the packaging in terms of the taste quality of the drink as shown in Table 4. Lastly, the environmental impact was based on the carbon footprint of the type of packaging.
The researchers had to calculate the values of the alternatives for this criterion.As mentioned in the earlier part of the paper, the environmental impact criterion will be based on the average carbon footprint of the type of packaging.The researchers first identified the average carbon footprint for both plastic and paper, and they obtained 3.5 kg and 0.94 kg of Carbon Dioxide emission for a kilogram of the material, respectively.They then identified the weight per unit of the packaging.They calculated the average carbon emission of the alternatives and then set a standard of 100 uses as the standard.Paper and acrylic had to be multiplied to 100 because they are single use while plastic only had a multiplier of 20 because on average, it was found to be useable for 5 times.The value of the acrylic was maintained for related references state that they can be used for 100 times on average.
Acrylic, (3) Paper, (4) Bamboo.From insight obtained from seven experts, traditional packaging is preferred due to its ability to fulfil most of the criteria, at a cheap cost.In addition, it is durable and easily accessible throughout the country.Acrylic ranked second is a reusable alternative, thus, it has a lower environmental impact compared to their counterparts, in terms of production based on the standard carbon footprint of plastics though costly compared to traditional.Causing a large disparity in both TOPSIS and ELECTRE Results.Bamboo and Paper ranked third and fourth respectively, are single use biodegradable packaging with similar properties.Resulting in minimal distinction in MCDM resulting in difficulty identifying significant differences.However, the rank consistency in the methods differ in Net Inferiority and Superiority ranking.TOPSIS and ELECTRE results differ in range of score, due to difference in computation.TOPSIS is the distance from the idealistic value of 1, while ELECTRE shows the differences between the alternatives.Thus, the values of ELECTRE can range from positive to negative.ELECTRE can display the superiority of an alternative in comparison.While TOPSIS evaluates the performance of an alternative in terms of achieving the Ideal value.These complementary techniques aid in conducting a comparative analysis of the different alternatives present, especially when resources will be involved.In conclusion, the final results from both analysis methods have been compiled into Table 6

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Process Flow Chart of the Research

Table 1 .
below, Summarization of main factors affecting sourcing of beverage packaging.

Table 5 .
Quality Measure of Durability and Taste Impact of Alternatives in Perspective of Experts.Summary of Findings for ELECTRE III and TOPSIS AnalysisFrom Table5, ELECTRE and TOPSIS analysis ranked the packing identically: (1) Traditional,

Table 6 .
below, Final Results of ELECTRE III and TOPSIS Analysis.This study would like to suggest three recommendations to improve what results have been obtained thus far.Firstly, there should be a larger array of factors that could potentially affect purchasing preference.In addition, each factor could have a much more extensive measures to ensure that it covers a wider area of influence.Secondly, adding more sample sizes from many different beverage stores could add a more in-depth analysis of consumer behavior.Lastly, is to diversify and add more types of beverage packaging materials.Adding the variety of alternative materials could provide the researcher with a greater range of data to analyze.10.ConclusionMultiple multicriteria decision making techniques such as the ELECTRE and TOPSIS have been discussed in this research.Through such methods, it was found that both quality and availability made up most of the factors that affect beverage packaging order preference.An unexpected turn of results when it came to results that traditional packaging are still the best