Sustainable and resilient cold chains: Enhancing adaptability, consistency, and digital transformation for success in a turbulent market

Sustainable and resilient cold chains (CC) are the backbone of several industries, ensuring the seamless transport and storage of temperature-sensitive products ranging from fresh produce and pharmaceuticals to life-saving vaccines. Particularly in times of disruptions, such as natural disasters or global health crises, the sustainability and resilience of CCs become even more crucial, highlighting the urgent need for research, innovation, and strategic planning in this domain. This study conducted a systematic review of the sustainable and resilient CC research literature. A total of 143 high-quality articles were shortlisted from the Web-of-Science (WoS) database for in-depth content analysis. This review clarifies the existing results and highlights the trending themes and persistent gaps in research pertaining to CC in a business context and at a strategic level. It covers notably disruptions and related impacts, the relationship between sustainability and resilience in CC, decision tools for sustainable and resilient CC, CC sustainability and resilience performance areas and measurement metrics, data-driven digital transformation for sustainable and resilient CC, and strategies for developing sustainable and resilient CC strategies. The results reveal that research on sustainable and resilient CC is growing; however, the field remains dominated by research methods that need to establish causality formally. Furthermore, the research area is fragmented into several subareas, and more conceptual and theoretical work is needed to advance the theoretical foundation of the domain. Finally, a proposed research agenda suggests 17 future avenues for improving the contribution to sustainable and resilient CC research.