Abstract
PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown have hit the food service industry very hard. The COVID-19 outbreak has created a sharp downturn for firms in the food service industry, compelling actors across the whole food service supply chain to rethink their strategies. The purpose of this paper is to document the impact of COVID-19 on the food service supply chain, as well as to identify crisis management strategies food service firms use during the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to survive the current and prepare for future pandemics.Design/methodology/approachWe performed a qualitative descriptive study using 21 semi-structured interviews with actors across the food service supply chain (i.e. farmers, wholesalers and food service providers). Data were collected to shed light on food service firms' decision making during the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to uncover various crisis management strategies used.FindingsBy integrating the disaster and crisis pyramid and resilience theory, four core crisis management strategies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic are conceptualized, i.e. (1) managing resources, (2) diversifying strategically, (3) prioritizing long-term outcomes and (4) bonding socially.Originality/valueThe theoretical contributions include documenting the performance impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food service supply chain and exploring crisis management strategies food service firms employed during the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, functioning and survival during a pandemic, an emerging field in literature, are central to this study. Additionally, while recent research suggests that integrating crisis management and resilience literature may provide a more complete understanding of the organization–crisis relationship, these literature streams mainly developed in isolation. By integrating the literature streams of crisis management and resilience and applying these theories to the COVID-19 crisis, our study provides specific managerial guidelines.
Highlights
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has shocked the world
What is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the daily business of food service supply chain actors? Second, what crisis management strategies do food service firms employ in the hectic early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic? Since previous research on supply chain disruptions suggests that firms need to focus on their supplier and customer base to combat these disruptions (Akkermans and van Wassenhove, 2018), we examine, in addressing our research questions, the food service firms’ decision making during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic across different actors within the food service supply chain
All interviewees agree on the disastrous impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the food service supply chain
Summary
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has shocked the world. The COVID-19 pandemic is first and foremost a human tragedy and has a growing impact on the global economy (Craven et al, 2020). The impact of the lockdown was felt not just by food service providers, and their upstream partners in the supply chain, i.e. wholesalers and farmers (Felix et al, 2020) [1 and 2]. In the early stages of the pandemic, suppliers such as farmers and wholesalers in the United States incurred, on average, monthly losses of $14 billion, while in the EU the monthly losses varied from V400 to V900 million across different countries (Garrett Peel, 2020; Schnepf and Monke, 2020). Urgent managerial guidance is needed by different actors within the food service supply chain to overcome the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic (Pedersen and Ritter, 2020)
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