Coronavirus disease 2019 and related lockdown policies in 2020 shocked food industry firms’ supply chains in developing regions. Firms “pivoted” to e‐commerce to reach consumers and e‐procurement to reach processors and farmers. “Delivery intermediaries” copivoted with food firms to help them deliver and procure. This was crucial to the ability of the food firms to pivot. The pandemic was a “crucible” that induced this set of fast‐tracking innovations, accelerating the diffusion of e‐commerce and delivery intermediaries, and enabling food industry firms to redesign, at least temporarily, and perhaps for the long term, their supply chains to be more resilient, and to weather the pandemic, supply consumers, and contribute to food security. We present a theoretical model to explain these firm strategies, and then apply the framework to classify firms’ practical strategies. We focus on cases in Asia and Latin America. Enabling policy and infrastructural conditions allowed firms to pivot and copivot fluidly.
Food retail has been in continuous evolution for the past century, both in developing and developed countries: from local traditional stores to supermarkets to e-commerce. In this paper we analyze the evolution of food retail by building a store choice equilibrium model and provide an illustrated discussion. The patterns in retail in any given time and place of different types of stores (such as traditional shops, supermarkets, and online e-commerce) depend on two main factors. The first are consumers' characteristics such as income, tastes, and travel costs of going to different stores and/or shipping costs if purchasing online. The second are the stores' cost structures, which include item costs from upstream producers, the costs of procurement supply chains (beyond the cost of the item) for perishable items, and the costs of in-store storage. We show under what conditions in equilibrium the different retail types exist and which can become dominant, and what types of goods (dry packaged foods versus perishables) are distributed by what type of retailers.
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