Developing a Sustainable Hygiene Management Evaluation Framework for Taiwan’s Catering Industry Using AHP and TOPSIS

To address the inherent limitations of qualitative hygiene inspections, this study establishes a structured MCDM framework to evaluate kitchen hygiene management in Taiwan’s catering industry by integrating the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The model integrates expert-weighted criteria to facilitate a structured risk-oriented assessment and support sustainable hygiene management through prioritized resource allocation and more systematic hygiene management. The AHP results determined hygiene behavior, cooking and processing, and storage operation management as the most influential criteria, underscoring the critical role of direct food handling practices. The framework was empirically applied to five large-scale catering enterprises and international tourist hotels with multinational operational backgrounds. TOPSIS analysis revealed significant performance variability, with establishment D achieving the highest relative closeness coefficient (0.6125) and establishment E the lowest (0.2358). These findings indicate that operational control measures play a more critical role in food safety and sustainable hygiene governance than supporting infrastructure alone. The proposed model serves as a quantitative decision-support tool for both industry self-assessment and regulatory inspections, facilitating prioritized resource allocation, continuous hygiene improvement, improved food safety governance, and more consistent long-term hygiene management practices. Sensitivity analysis further demonstrated that the overall comparative ranking structure remained generally consistent under alternative normalization conditions, although minor variation was observed between the two highest-performing alternatives.