Supply Chain Sustainability during COVID-19: Last Mile Food Delivery in China

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a strict 100-day lockdown period in Spring of 2020 in China. One of the consequences of the lockdown was the disruption of the food supply chain for the millions of people confined to their homes. The well-established online food delivery service (OFDS) in China were disrupted by pressure to scale up rapidly to resolve the last mile of food delivery. The importance of the OFDS during periods of crises became apparent, as did the realization that uninterrupted food distribution was only possible due to the presence and scalability of the existing delivery network. Focusing on the importance of an established OFDS as a foundation for food distribution, this paper seeks to explore factors that affect consumers’ perception and acceptance of the retail food delivery system in urban China. By applying the extended theory of planned behavior (TPB), mean value calculation, univariate linear regression, and multiple linear regression have been adopted to test the hypotheses. Data obtained online from 260 participants demonstrate that the software’s characteristics concerning hedonic motivation (HM), convenience motivation (CM), perceived ease of use (PEOU), navigational design (ND), information quality (IQ), privacy and security (PS), restaurant credibility (RC), and perceived severity (Psev) have positive and significant impacts on customers’ intention to use (ITU), and thus, affects the actual use (AU) of the application in a positive way. The findings of this research contribute to the existing literature by consolidating, validating, and extending the TPB model, especially under the large-scale public health crisis circumstances. Customized practical insights are provided to emphasize developing HM, CM, Psev, and RC factors with maximal marginal effects that promote consumer acceptance; this is a prerequisite to the development of a robust OFDS. which can be repurposed during periods of crises to provide sustainable last-mile food delivery networks.

Exploring Factors Affecting Consumer Behavioral Intentions toward Online Food Ordering in Thailand

“…A review of the research into food delivery and sustainable development goals found that consumer behavior studies are still in the early stages (e.g., there was not much use for drone food delivery. As a result, business owners were required to do a significant amount of marketing [44]. The article "Supply Chain Sustainability During COVID-19: Last Mile Food Delivery in China" analyzed factors affecting consumer acceptance for sustainability in business operations [45], specifically, the last mile of online food delivery on the Glovo platform.…”

A Thematic Review on Using Food Delivery Services during the Pandemic: Insights for the Post-COVID-19 Era

“…In the reviewed studies, researchers focused on COVID-19-related risks in addition to discussing the traditional risk dimensions. Perceived risk usually negatively influences consumers’ behavioral intention or attitude; however, fear of COVID-19 [ 13 ] and perceived severity [ 44 ] were found to positively influence consumers’ intention to use food delivery services. This is because researchers viewed the perceived COVID-19-related risks from different perspectives (see Section 3.2.2 ).…”

“… Theme 1: technical and utilitarian factors [ 6 , 12 , 13 , 15 , 26 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 42 , 44 , 46 , 48 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 58 ]. …”

“… Theme 6: risk-related factors [ 9 , 13 , 15 , 23 , 26 , 28 , 34 , 35 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 44 , 48 , 52 , 54 , 56 , 59 , 60 ]. …”

“… Theme 8: food-related attributes [ 12 , 14 , 24 , 27 , 35 , 36 , 40 , 42 , 44 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 53 , 59 , 61 ]. …”