Food Cold Chain Management: From A Structured Literature Review to A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

Purpose. Since last few years, cold chain management (CCM) has gained growing interest among practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and academicians. This paper provides a review focused on food cold chain management (FCCM) over the last sixteen years to identify state of the art in the literature, highlight research gaps, and define appropriate research questions for future research. Design/methodology/approach. The paper analyses the content of 89 research articles published on the topic of food cold chain (FCC) from 2001 to 2016 within different journals. The Scopus and Web of Science databases were taken into consideration to shortlist research articles. Henceforth, we scrutinized the FCC industry to offer some effective strategies to tackle the chain complexities. We also draw interwoven between FCC infrastructure, integration, stakeholders’ interest, value addition, partners’ performance and overall food cold chain performance (FCCP) into a conceptual framework. Findings. This paper identifies four research gaps in the literature of FCC concerning the most popular approaches used for the FCCP measurement, the performance measurement metrics, the factors which negatively affect the FCCP, and the main sustainability issues in FCC. Originality/value. This study identifies research questions which represent possible areas of investigation to improve the body of the FCCP evaluation and management. Furthermore, the FCC practitioners, food authorities, and researchers might find this review useful, as it draws a clear picture of research in the respective domain.