An integrated literature review on sustainable food supply chains: Exploring research themes and future directions

Abstract

The sustainable food supply chain (SFSC) is a research area of global significance. The increasing number of research articles in SFSC justifies this. With 80% of publications in SFSC coming up in the last 7 years, this field is expanding and diversifying at a rapid rate. The research on sustainable food supply chain (SFSC) covers a wide variety of areas and has a wide range of research themes in FSC. To facilitate the theoretical understanding of SFSC, we have conducted a review of the literature on SFSC. With the aim to define prominent research themes in SFSC, we follow an integrated review approach of structured literature review (SLR), bibliometric analysis, and thematic analysis. Bibliometric analysis was conducted using the vosviewer software version 1.6.16. The thematic analysis identified- “Waste management”, “SC sustainability and impact assessment”, “Decision support”, “Operations management and optimization”, “Food quality and safety”, “Sustainable business models”, “Innovation and technological solution”, “SC strategy”, and “Social sustainability” as the key emergent themes. We discuss the conceptual and theoretical basis of each of these themes. “SC sustainability and impact assessment” is identified as the most dominant theme in SFSC. Innovation and technological solution is an emerging theme with many new publications related to disruptive technologies coming up. Research in collaboration and decision theory-based approaches is important to enable sustainability in FSC. Quantifying waste streams, identifying hotspots are important future directions of research in SFSCM. Circular economy, AFSC, and the use of advanced technologies to enable circularity and sustainability also have great scope. The review aims to help researchers and academicians understand the boundaries and domain of SFSC and the future scope of these themes about how they can enhance the sustainability in SFSC.