**1. Introduction**

The food industry has a significant impact on the environment and society. Up to 37 percent of man-made greenhouse gas emissions is caused by the food industry, making the industry a major driver of climate change [1]. Today's food production affects entire ecosystems through converting land use, threatening biodiversity, consuming large amounts of water, overfertilizing soils, and damaging or destroying biotopes [2,3]. Additionally, social standards, such as the industry's working conditions and wages, are poor, especially in developing countries [4].

Consumers, governments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly aware of the environmental and social effects of the food industry. They are calling for compliance with higher sustainability standards [5]. While many food companies aim for improving their sustainability, they face the challenge of implementing sustainability standards throughout their whole supply chains. Limited transparency in the supply chains and a missing influence on sub-suppliers, for example, make it difficult for food companies to increase sustainability throughout the whole supply chain [6]. To counteract these challenges, companies rely on supply chain governance and its mechanisms, which encourages partners to adopt more sustainable behaviors [7].

Supply chain governance refers to a system of mechanisms that aims to influence business partners' behavior, coordinate transactions, and safeguard against opportunism [8]. Implementing sustainability standards in food supply chains using governance has already been researched (e.g., [9–11]) whereby the focus was mainly on individual sections of supply chains (e.g., raw material production) [7]. To gain a comprehensive insight into the actual application intentions and the effects of the governance, research on the governance of supply chains should, however, consider the perspectives of all stages of a supply chain. Schäfer [12] investigated, for example, an entire supply chain in the food industry,

focusing on the ethical aspects of animal husbandry in food production. While the isolated focus on certain sustainability dimensions provides detailed insights on how to improve corresponding sustainability standards, it is recommended to consider the simultaneous implementation of environmental, economic, and social sustainability standards to ensure long-term compliance [13].

Therefore, this research aims to investigate the governance of food supply chains to simultaneously implement social, environmental, and economical sustainability standards at all stages of a supply chain. We focus on governance mechanisms (GM), which can be used by companies to actively influence actors and thus coordinate their activities in the supply chain [8]. To properly represent and analyze the influence of GMs throughout the whole supply chain and thus provide a holistic picture of the functioning of sustainability governance, it is important to consider all stages of the supply chain, from the raw material production to the retailer, during data collection. Therefore, we conduct a case study research of a whole food supply chain to answer the following research questions:

RQ1: How do governance mechanisms increase sustainability in food supply chains? RQ2: How do the functioning and the application intentions of governance mechanisms differ between the stages of food supply chains?

This research contributes to the operations and sustainability literature by identifying and analyzing GMs for a holistic and long-term sustainability enhancement in food supply chains. We show how the application of GMs differs on the different tiers of supply chains and what actors intend by using certain GMs. Various propositions can be derived, which provide new insights for theorists but also practitioners interested in the sustainability governance of food supply chains.
