This paper suggests an efficient cooperative coevolutionary algorithm(CCEA) consisting of five populations of chromosomes to solve the multi-stage supply chain network design problem. The mathematical model is described. The problem is broken down into five subproblems. For each subproblem, a population of chromosomes is created and each chromosome is represented as a permutation of integers. For each chromosome in a population, a decoding method is suggested to get a partial solution to the corresponding subproblem. Then the procedure of combining all chromosomes from each of the five populations to achieve a feasible solution is suggested. Both the method of deciding the collaborator of a population and the method of combining it with other collaborators is designed to evaluate the suitability of a given chromosome. An experimental study is carried out. The results show that our CCEA generates better performance than the previous CCEA for larger problems and that the difference in performance between two algorithms tends to get larger.