During the global 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the advantages of online food delivery (FD) were obvious, as it facilitated consumer access to prepared meals and enabled food providers to keep operating. However, online FD is not without its critics, with reports of consumer and restaurant boycotts. It is, therefore, time to take stock and consider the broader impacts of online FD, and what they mean for the stakeholders involved. Using the three pillars of sustainability as a lens through which to consider the impacts, this review presents the most up-to-date research in this field, revealing a raft of positive and negative impacts. From an economic standpoint, while online FD provides job and sale opportunities, it has been criticized for the high commission it charges restaurants and questionable working conditions for delivery people. From a social perspective, online FD affects the relationship between consumers and their food, as well as influencing public health outcomes and traffic systems. Environmental impacts include the significant generation of waste and its high carbon footprints. Moving forward, stakeholders must consider how best to mitigate the negative and promote the positive impacts of online FD to ensure that it is sustainable in every sense.

Smart packaging, an emerging technology in the food packaging industry incorporates both active and intelligent technologies. Consumer demand for natural products and increasingly extended and diverse supply chains required to feed the growing global population, mean that traditional packaging is becoming less capable of meeting the functional demands placed on it. To help ensure the commercial success of proposed smart packaging technologies a thorough understanding of consumers attitudes toward them is required. Understanding the cultural, social and cognitive factors that affect acceptance will help “fine tune” smart packaging development to best meet consumer preferences and needs and ensure that communication about the technologies effectively addresses consumer concerns and educates them on the benefits. This systematic review of 28 peer reviewed journal articles summarizes the current knowledge on consumer acceptance or rejection of active and intelligent packaging, and the behavioral forces behind those attitudes. Articles containing primary data and published in the English language over the last 10 years reporting consumer responses to active and/or intelligent packaging technologies in general or to more specific technologies that achieved the functional goals of active or intelligent packaging were obtained and analyzed for themes in the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. Themes were organized into groups as to whether they identified control variables, moderating variables, barriers or motivations to purchase and the benefits of the technology. To develop a conceptual framework for understanding consumer preferences for smart packaging, the identified themes were integrated with several consumer behavior models including the theory of planned behavior and an attitude model. Consumer perceptions of smart packaging is a poorly covered research area with most research being clustered in Europe and a smaller cluster in the Americas so there were significant opportunities to build on the body of knowledge.

Purpose: Changing consumption patterns have led to a number of transformations throughout the food cycle, and understanding how and why people purchase local food is important. This paper aims to examine the characteristics of the people leading this phenomenon: those that prefer to buy locally produced food.Design/methodology/approach: In order to explore the characteristics of local food purchasers, a single item question, “I try to buy a lot of locally produced food”, was included in the food section of a New Zealand consumer lifestyles survey for which 3,556 responses were collected. The full survey included 600 questions across the full attitude, interest and opinion schedule.Findings: For people who express a strong intention to purchase local food, this behaviour is linked to the types of food they eat (e.g. unprocessed foods), where they buy it (e.g. at speciality stores), and how they cook it (e.g. follow recipes). A range of personality and other personal characteristics differ between local and non‐local food buyers, with the former segment being more liberal, interested in quality, and frugal.Practical implications: Consumers who express an interest in purchasing local food are a demanding segment of the population whose interest in food makes them critical judges of produce. Local food must thus be fresh and value for money. Growing this sector requires making local food more accessible through mainstream retail outlets.Originality/value: While something is known about why people buy local food, less is known about other aspects of local food consumers, the range of attitudes they hold towards food or their food‐related behaviours.