32The management of food cold chains is receiving more and more attention, both in practice 33 and in the scientific literature. In this paper, we review temperature abuse in food cold chains 34 that operate in different countries, as well as cold chain solutions focused on food quality and 35 safety. Our key findings are: 1) temperature management in chilled food products was the main 36 focus of research, the most investigated food categories were meat, dairy, fish, fruit, and 37 vegetable products; 2) most temperature abuse reported is in the cold chains of developed 38 countries, whereas much less is known about the situation in developing countries; 3) recent 39 technology applied in temperature monitoring provides a significant contribution to food cold 40 chain, but, further investigation of its application is necessary to generate appropriate data; 41 and 4) food waste may be reduced with a better temperature management in food cold chains.
42Additionally, we also investigated a new possibility for future research in food cold chains. 43 Keywords: temperature abuses, perishable products, food safety, food quality, food waste 44 45 46 47 48 50A cold chain is an uninterrupted-temperature controlled transport and storage system of 51 refrigerated goods between upstream suppliers and consumers designed to maintain the quality 52 and safety of food products (Montanari, 2008; Taoukis et al., 2016). Unexpected temperature 53 changes or abuses in food cold chain can lead to compromised food safety and food quality 54 that ultimately can result in loss of consumer confidence and increased levels of food waste. It 55 has been reported that roughly one-third of global food production is wasted annually 56 (Gustavsson et al., 2011). Food waste refers to an unacceptable level of quality of food or food 57 discarded by retailers or consumers due to microbial rot, disease or insect damage. A high share 58 of these losses is related to poor post-harvest handling, lack of proper facilities, and insufficient 59 training for operators in the cold chain. In the last decade, cold chain problems have been 60 investigated and reviewed (Koutsoumanis & Gougouli, 2015; Mercier et al., 2017; Montanari, 61 2008; Taoukis et al., 2016). These studies, however, have little discussion about the possible 62 means of managing temperature abuse with consideration to recent technological 63 advancements. To respond to this gap, this article gives an overview of recommendations, 64 including temperature-monitoring technologies and systems. 65 2 Materials and methods 66 Literature reviews may be carried out to improve the understanding of the topic or to investigate 67 new research opportunities. Following the methods of Cherrafi et al. (2016) with a minor 68 modification, we performed content analysis on the reviewed papers to define the unit of 69 analysis, classify the publication content, evaluate the content, and delimit the field. The journal 70 databases used in this study were PubMed, Elsevier, Wiley Online, Emerald, Springer, and ...
