Digitalizalization in Food Supply Chains: A Bibliometric Review and Key-route Main Path Analysis

Abstract

Technological advances such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, big data, social media, 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 nearly over 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 journals articles published during the past five decades.

Agricultural Robotics and Automation [TC Spotlight]

“…Stateoftheart progress in research and future challenges is docu mented in a wide range of review papers and book chapters addressing agriculture in general [1], [3], [4], [5] and specific application domains, including phenotyping [6], [7], [8] ara ble farming [9], livestock farming [10], greenhouse horticulture [2], orchard management [11], forestry [12], and food processing [13]. Review papers also address specific technologies in the context of agricultural robotics, such as computer vision [14], [15], active perception [16], unmanned aer ial vehicle technologies [17], [18], cov erage path planning in arable farming [19], and grasping and soft grasping [20], [21]. Some illustrative examples of agrifood robotics are documented in Figure 2.…”