Logistics in the food and grocery retail market: an overview on main issues and future research directions

•Purpose: Logistics issues related to the food and grocery sectors today are on the entrepreneurial, social and technological agenda of many actors. Due to the extent of the covered areas and the continuous technological innovations, the resulting body of research appears quite fragmented. From an engineering management perspective, this paper presents a systematic literature review that aims to consolidate the knowledge, analyse the development, clarify better the trends, the main topics and the possible gaps linked to the role of supply chain and logistics in the food and grocery sector. • Research Approach: this paper applied an exploratory approach, in particular, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR)is performed to achieve the research goal. • Findings and Originality: Through the analysis of a corpus of 52 articles, the most critical research contributions on food and grocery logistics and supply chain that represent the structural backbone in the development of the research over time in the field are detected. Based on these findings, this working paper presents an SLR related to a research area in which the literature is hugely fragmented. The results provide insights into the current trends, the main investigated topics and the research gaps. • Research Impact: throughout the analysis of the scientific literature is possible to understand which are the most explored topics and which are the main research gaps, that could constitute useful information for researchers and the first attempt of future guidelines for the research about logistics in the food and grocery sector. • Practical Impact: Some gaps emerged from the literature, in particular, those related to the lack of data concerning the demand could enable the possibility to find new consumers niches and new business opportunities.