The agrifood literature suggests that trust is one of the most prominent and critical aspect for not only the effectiveness of collaboration, but also for improving sustainability performance. In this sense, the understanding of how trust works in agrifood supply chains is essential to find better paths to improve the functioning of those structures. The purpose of this article was to carry out a meta-analysis on the relationships of trust among the stakeholders in agrifood supply chains, to obtain data on previous publications as well as to justify future research on the search topics. For the bibliometric study, the R software in RStudio and the R packages bibliometrix and biblioshiny were used. The documents were extracted from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Documents related to the researched topics, that were published in the last 11 years, were collected to the following meta-analysis. Of 277 documents published from 1995 to 2021, 11 review articles and 74 papers were analyzed. From these publications, we obtained data on the main authors and sources related to trust among the stakeholders in agrifood supply chains, on the methodologies used, as well as on trends for future researches. The present work brings forward data in a unique and up-to-date way.

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Summary During qualitative research on trust, conducted in a mariculture chain in southern Brazil, the theme of informality emerged spontaneously in most interviews. Although it is difficult to measure, some data and estimates point out that informality is still quite present worldwide, but especially in emerging and developing countries, and this situation was confirmed in the studied supply chain. In analysing the narratives, we noticed that this is a chronic issue which bothers the producers that are properly formalised mainly because of unfair competition, and hinders the organisation of the chain. Some factors foster the persistence of informality, such as family labour and temporary jobs, the low educational level of entrepreneurs, lack of adequate supervision and cultural aspects of producers and their families. We could corroborate the perspectives of modernisation (informality is still persistent), neo‐liberal (informal entrepreneurs reject the bureaucracy of an over‐regulated market) and post‐structuralist (informality is a way of life related to identity, social position and/or resistance against the formal structure) theories. Our research has shown us that the situation found is contributing to a reduction in the number of formal producers and impairing the development of that local supply chain, as well as its sustainability.