Abstract
Technological advances such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, big data, social media, and geographic information systems represent a building block of the digital transformation that supports the resilience of the food supply chain (FSC) and increases its efficiency. This paper reviews the literature surrounding digitalization in FSCs. A bibliometric and key-route main path analysis was carried out to objectively and analytically uncover the knowledge development in digitalization within the context of sustainable FSCs. The research began with the selection of 2140 articles published over nearly five decades. Then, the articles were examined according to several bibliometric metrics such as year of publication, countries, institutions, sources, authors, and keywords frequency. A keyword co-occurrence network was generated to cluster the relevant literature. Findings of the review and bibliometric analysis indicate that research at the intersection of technology and the FSC has gained substantial interest from scholars. On the basis of keyword co-occurrence network, the literature is focused on the role of information communication technology for agriculture and food security, food waste and circular economy, and the merge of the Internet of Things and blockchain in the FSC. The analysis of the key-route main path uncovers three critical periods marking the development of technology-enabled FSCs. The study offers scholars a better understanding of digitalization within the agri-food industry and the current knowledge gaps for future research. Practitioners may find the review useful to remain ahead of the latest discussions of technology-enabled FSCs. To the authors’ best knowledge, the current study is one of the few endeavors to explore technology-enabled FSCs using a comprehensive sample of journal articles published during the past five decades.
Highlights
The food supply chain (FSC) plays a critical role in the world economy [1] and has been one of the crucial pillars of human civilization throughout history [2,3]
The keyword co-occurrence network is used to identify “keywords” that co-occur in at least two publications in a time span [93]. This scientometric method enables to generate clusters that provide a broader view of different research foci in a specific knowledge domain [94]
We began by extracting all keywords from each publication
Summary
The food supply chain (FSC) plays a critical role in the world economy [1] and has been one of the crucial pillars of human civilization throughout history [2,3] It refers to the chain starting from the raw materials in agriculture to the process of production and product distribution and the linkages between them [4,5]. From the definition, it appears that the FSC encompasses all the stages regarding the supply, production, and consumption of a food product. The perishable nature of food products and food loss throughout the FSC compels academia and industry to improve real-time monitoring and traceability capabilities [14,15]
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