In the past decade, the Thai Government has promoted Thailand as “the kitchen of the world” as it is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of processed food items (Thailand Board of Investment, 2013). Consequently, Thai food manufacturers have increasing potential for global competitive advantage. Typical food supply chain members – growers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers – work to deliver food products from agricultural sectors to consumers, as shown in Figure 1 (Maloni and Brown, 2006). They must realize the importance of responding to not only the quality of food products and consumer health but also global food security and sustainability challenges (e.g. fair trade, environmental and organic foods, labor and human rights, animal welfare) (Shokri et al., 2014). Therefore, Thai food manufacturers must focus on sustainability issues and implement sustainability practices along the supply chain to achieve sustained competitive advantage and better sustainability performance. Food manufacturing companies address sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) through collaboration (Beske et al., 2014) and incentives (Wiese and Toporowski, 2013). Upstream firms in agriculture and food supply chains located in emerging economies mostly incur challenges (Gold and Heikkurinen, 2013). Such challenges include their limited organizational capabilities in implementing sustainability practices in Thailand (Setthasakko, 2009) and the differing capabilities of small-scale upstream and large-scale downstream firms in the supply chain in Brazil (Hall and Matos, 2010) and India (Lokesh et al., 2017). Sustainable supply chain collaboration (SSCC) is one of the most important practices in SSCM. Many researchers highlight the importance of collaboration between firms to improve sustainability performance (Vachon and Klassen, 2008; Blome et al., 2014). Moreover, a higher level of collaboration leads to sustained competitive advantage (Cao and Zhang, 2011). Major stakeholders, including customers and governments, have pressed firms to comply with sustainability requirements (Eltayeb et al., 2010; Huang et al., 2015). In response, early adopters of sustainability practices have been able to develop their internal resources and capabilities (Pagell and Wu, 2009; Wolf, 2011) and coordinate vertically with strategic supply chain partners to improve sustainability (Paulraj, 2011). Although many scholars suggest that SSCC improves corporate performance, the findings vary with regard to environmental aspects, especially for emerging economies. SSCC is effective in manufacturing firms in developed economies such as the USA, Germany, and Japan (Gimenez et al., 2012) as well as China (Zhu and Sarkis, 2007), while it is not yet evident in emerging economies in Asia such as Malaysia (Eltayeb et al., 2011), India (Dubey et al., 2014), and especially Thailand (Laosirihongthong et al., 2013). In addition, several small- and medium-sized firms lag behind in the adoption of sustainability practices with lower levels of perceived environmental risk (Holt and Ghobadian, 2009). Although previous studies have investigated incentives as a driver of sustainability initiatives, further empirical research is required to emphasize their additional role in enhancing the effects of SSCC. Indeed, a greater understanding of transforming sustainability practices in the manufacturing industry is needed rather than simply exploring drivers and barriers (Touboulic and Walker, 2015). According to Paulraj (2011), the involvement of suppliers (e.g. through incentives) should be explored beyond the antecedents of sustainability practices. In particular, Wong et al. (2012) suggest that the influence of customer incentives on the sustainability practices-performance relationship should be examined.