Food safety and halal food in the supply chain: Review and bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Purpose: Researchers have been actively investigating various issues concerning food safety and halal food in the supply chain. The ultimate goal is to provide guarantees for quality and conformance regarding food standards and demanding expectation from the consumers. We review a set of two-decade food safety and halal food in supply chain (SC) literature from 1990 to 2018 (month of February) in order to pinpoint the problems, models, solution approaches and more importantly, the future directions of this field. Design/methodology/approach: Our method employs the 120 published articles on food safety and halal food in SC research. Various techniques from statistics, bibliometrics, and analytics are systematically deployed to gain insights on how the literature address these two topics.Findings: The predominant contributing articles, authors, affiliations, and keywords have been reviewed, clustered, and thoroughly analyzed. Through systematic graphical and clustering analyses, four major clusters regarding food safety and two clusters in halal food in SC research have been identified as the most promising and potential future for research opportunities.Research limitations/implications: This study focuses on articles that discuss food safety and halal.Practical implications: Our findings provide valuable insights to understand the major clusters of the research endeavour along with the plausible pathways to where they would likely develop in the future. With these insights, researchers and practitioners shall be able to devise initiatives that are of high relevance and significance in the near future.Social implications: This research provides an understanding to the reader about the relationship between food safety and halal.Originality/value: This paper provides the first systematic overview of food safety and halal food for supply chain researchers to see the big picture of the field. Serving as the thread connecting research endeavour in these two research areas, our novel work highlights how the work is connected, which research clusters have been the center-of-attention during the last two decades, and consequently, which areas are still lacking an investigation. We believe that people in both academia and industry who are keen to develop a rigorous solution to ensuring food safety and food halal-ness to satisfy global market requirement will be benefitting the most from our analysis.