Perishable products supply chains: Research trends over the last decade

With the proliferation of standards and regulations on perishable products quality and safety and the increasing interest of consumers for the credence attributes of the products they purchase, the research on the topic of perishable products supply chain assumes a pivotal role in the supply chain management field. Nevertheless, in the last decades the research focused mainly on inventory management, while the management of the perishable products supply chain as a whole has caught the eyes of scholars just in the recent years. Therefore, this paper presents a survey on the extant literature on perishable products supply chain in order to identify the main research trends over the last ten years and propose future research questions. Firstly, in order to give to the reader an overview of the literature on perishable products supply chain a bibliometric analysis is presented. Particularly, a database containing all the abstracts on the topic over the period 2008-2018 is analyzed through a pattern classification tool. Then, a more detailed literature review of the most relevant papers is presented and finally future research topics are illustrated and summarized.