IL CONTRIBUTO DEL MANAGEMENT A UN MONDO PIU' SOSTENIBILE

The Evolution of Food Recovery: a Bibliometric Analysis

ALBERTO MORGANTE

Objectives. In recent decades, concepts which address the resolution or reduction of food poverty and insecurity, such as food recovery and food sharing, have received increasing attention from governments, non-profit organizations, and academics. Even greater interest has been prompted by the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated the problems of those people already living in poverty, and at the same time impoverished many more people who lost their jobs. Before the pandemic, more than 820 million people were classified as chronically food insecure, of whom 135 million were classified at crisis level or even worse (United Nations, 2020). As mentioned above, the unexpected arrival of a global pandemic has only made pre-existing food poverty problems worse. In fact, it has been estimated that in 2020 around 49 million people have become poor due to the Covid-19 pandemic (Pereira et al., 2020).

Food banks are defined as organizations which operate to provide food to charities and other organizations which support food insecure people (Gentilini, 2013). The advent of digitalization has enabled the rise of digital platforms designed to manage food redistribution as a means of waste prevention. Examples are the food sharing digital platforms, like Olio and Too Good to Go, which were created to recover food surpluses in order to redistribute them to those people who need it most (Michelini et al., 2018).

The digital platforms developed to tackle food poverty have been defined as “circularity brokers” because these organizations operate as market intermediaries, exploiting digitalization to offer new approaches to waste recovery models (Ciulli et al. 2019).

#food banks #food recovery #food sharing #Sharing Economy #Sustainability #Waste management