Resilience in the Food Industry: Interviews-based evidences

Resilience is a key issue for the food context as never before, given the several challenges that companies are subjected to such as the climate change, geo-political instability or price volatility.Literature returned a gap in terms of tools and metrics for determining and quantifying the resilience level of agri-food systems, and after a preliminary top-down perspective, the bottom-up approach is proposed in this document.Indeed, the aim is to present and discuss results from semi-structured interviews carried out with 7 practitioners of the food industry (based in Parma, in the heart of the Italian food valley) aimed at identifying the most important factors to be considered when evaluating resilience, according to their opinion.Results allowed to derive a set of 22 potential indicators, which will be implemented in a following model for quantifying the resilience level of an agri-food supply chain.Indicators are classified according to the supply chain area they belong to, namely: supply, production/transformation and distribution/sales.The cash flow availability and the diversification of both raw material suppliers and produced finished products turned out to be the most important factors to be considered, almost unanimously.