Literature review of short food supply chain: challenges and opportunities

The long-term availability of food is essential to guaranty human existence. Therefore, relevant stakeholders, the government, and society are increasingly concerned about public food procurement in the most sustainable manner where distance and cultural characteristics are considered. While short food supply chains (SFSC) are essential, little is known about the relevance, magnitude, and policy lesson within a developing country context. Purpose – to identify the thrust of the SFSC; classified in terms of depth of research, content analysis, and methodology; and provide direction for future research. Research methodology – systematic literature review (SLR) on SFSC and corresponding data analysis. Findings – while identifying heterogeneous clusters, this study provides new and insightful evidence that was a prior unclear. This study reached plausible conclusions with three major gap identifications and offered relevant recommendations to redirect policy and research on the subject. Research limitations – the study is limited to the SFSC from studies published from 2001 through 2020. Practical implications – the study can help decide relevant stakeholders, the government, and society on use-cases of SFSC. Originality/Value – the paper presents state-of-the-art SRL results on SFSC, identifies main gaps and future research directions and extends the analysis by further appraising these papers' results in a stratified manner to reach a comprehensive conclusion sufficient for an international readership