Vietnamese Food Firms Advance Business, Social and Environmental Goals Together, Study Finds

A new study of Vietnam’s food manufacturing sector suggests that companies pursuing sustainability do not face an unavoidable trade-off between profit, people and planet. Analyzing data from 233 manufacturers, researchers report that perceived business, social and environmental innovation tend to co-move positively rather than pulling against one another.

The work, published open access in Discover Sustainability, tests a long-standing tension in management theory. The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework frames organizational performance around three pillars—business, social and environmental value—but the field remains divided over whether these domains act as reinforcing complements, separate additive practices, or competing trade-offs in everyday operations.

Vietnam’s food manufacturing industry offered a useful setting for the question. The sector sits within an emerging economy undergoing rapid regulatory transition, where firms face evolving compliance demands that touch all three TBL dimensions at once.

Methodologically, the team used mirror ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models to examine relationships among the three innovation domains. These models showed positive conditional associations across business, social and environmental innovation, indicating that firms reporting strength in one pillar were more likely to report strength in the others.

The researchers also ran pairwise interaction tests to check whether combinations of pillars added explanatory power beyond their individual effects. The tests yielded negligible gains in explained variance, a pattern the authors interpret as support for an additive main-effect structure in this sample and specification. In other words, the three domains behaved as parallel contributors rather than as synergistic pairs.

To probe whether firms fall into distinct strategic types—say, profit-focused versus sustainability-focused—the team applied K-means clustering to standardized pillar scores. Instead of separate profiles, the analysis identified what the authors describe as an intensity ladder: firms differed mainly in how deeply their capabilities extended across all three pillars, not in which pillar they emphasized.

These findings suggest that Vietnamese food manufacturers advance business, social and environmental dimensions simultaneously, likely to satisfy comprehensive compliance baselines. Differences among firms appear to arise primarily in capability depth rather than in fundamentally different strategic orientations.

The authors frame this additive capability perspective as a potential pathway for system-level upgrading. If firms build routines that serve all three TBL domains together, managers and policymakers could align firm-level practices with long-term economic and sustainability development goals.

The authors note that the additive pattern holds for this specific sample and model specification, so the results describe associations within one sector and country at a particular point in regulatory change. Even so, the study adds emerging-economy evidence to an unresolved theoretical debate, suggesting that in Vietnam’s food industry the three bottom lines may function less as a balancing act and more as a single, scalable capability.

Subject of Research: Triple bottom line innovation capability in Vietnamese food manufacturing firms

Article Title: Triple bottom line as additive innovation capability in Vietnamese food manufacturing firms

Article References: Bui, T., Nguyen, T.-A. H., Dao, M.-H., Nguyen, A.-T. T., & Phan, T. T. A. (2026). Triple bottom line as additive innovation capability in Vietnamese food manufacturing firms. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04766-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04766-6

Keywords: triple bottom line, Vietnam, food manufacturing, sustainability, innovation capability, OLS regression, K-means clustering, emerging economy, regulatory transition, corporate sustainability, Triple, bottom