Inventory management for perishable products: a review of the recent trends (2017-2020)

Inventory management represents one of the main criticalities that companies have to deal with, since it contributes to determine the match between supply and demand; an efficient and optimal system surely represents a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic market. This issue, however, is further complicated when products to be managed are perishable (e.g., food, beverages, medicines, flowers etc.), meaning they can be deteriorated or become obsolete. This peculiarity generates a niche segment of inventory management research, which is that of inventory management for perishable products, characterized by a limited period during which the products can be sold or consumed with profit, which corresponds to their shelf-life. This is the topic of the present manuscript, whose aim is to provide a literature review of 164 scientific documents published between 2017 and 2020 and targeting this issue. Both descriptive (i.e., temporal and geographical distributions and type of research) and contents-related (i.e., keywords analysis) parameters are investigated for this sample of papers, showing a growing trend with a prevalence of analytic models developed. Issues related to sustainability turned out to be emergent topics.