Marketing

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak

Agriculture

Food systems

Betacoronavirus

Computer security

Virology

Archaeology

Scope (computer science)

Food security

Economics

Computer science

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Food science

Food processing

Outbreak

Business

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Adaptability

Food industry

Vulnerability (computing)

Thermodynamics

Physics

Meat packing industry

Management

Geography

Food supply

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Supply chain

Internal medicine

Coronavirus Infections

Industrial organization

Medicine

Chemistry

Programming language

Resilience (materials science)

Pandemic

Agricultural economics

Disease

Pathology

Meat Science

The Covid-19 pandemic has upended societies, economic activity, and business environments. With a focus on the meat processing sector, this paper considers the short, medium, and potential long-term implications of the pandemic for food supply chains. A series of short-run demand and supply shocks affected the food system. The pandemic has generated a lively discourse around the adaptability and resilience of food supply chains in the medium to longer term. Scale and scope economies in meat processing offer significant cost and efficiency advantages, while a more dispersed industry structure can be more flexible. The pandemic is likely to accelerate the adoption of automation and digitalization within food supply chains. The Covid-19 pandemic also focused consumer attention on the food system and the nature of food supply chains. Consumers' underlying food values may shape their response to uncertainty during a pandemic. The pandemic offers lessons for the food industry in proactively identifying and addressing points of vulnerability within supply chains.

The Covid-19 pandemic and meat supply chains