The Resilience of UK's Food Retail Supply Chains and Business Strategies

The resilience of the food supply chain is essential for ensuring food security, social well-being, and economic stability. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has tested the resilience of the UK's retail food supply chain and highlighted areas of weakness that need to be addressed to ensure its preparedness for future disruptions. The food supply chain is a significant contributor to environmental degradation, including climate change, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and water pollution. Considering the growing importance to adopt and promote sustainable practices along the entire food supply chain, the pandemic is an opportunity to explore innovative solutions and change to a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable food supply chain for the benefit of people and the planet. In recent months, the UK food retail sector has been experiencing shortages of various products including fresh produce, dairy, meat, and certain fast-moving consumer goods. These shortages are caused by transportation issues, labour shortages, panic-buying by consumers and weather-related problems. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the UK's food retail supply chain disruptions and the level of resilience in the system and examine the response to identify the factors that could contribute to improving resiliency for future disruptions. To achieve this, an in-depth literature review was conducted to understand the product-specific shortages or disruptions and the response of the UK's food retail sector to mitigate its impact on their operations. The results highlight that innovative business strategies and certain critical success factors could increase the retail food supply chain's ability to withstand disruptions. This emphasizes the importance of innovation and the adoption of new business strategies in the retail food sector to be able to adapt and respond to future challenges.