A Trade War and a Pandemic: Disruption and Resilience in the Food Bank Supply Chain

Supply chain turbulence has become the new normal and understanding supply chain resilience is essential for business-to-business firms. Building on dynamic capabilities theory, we examine three literature gaps on supply chain resilience: resource reconfiguration during high impact disruptions; resilience across multiple supply chain levels; and resilience when government is involved. The food bank supply chain is examined during the turbulence of 2018-2020 from the U.S.-China trade war and COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the trade war, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) shifted agricultural commodities intended for exports to food banks, creating scale and scope supply shocks, and this was followed by food demand and supply shocks from the pandemic. In-depth interviews were conducted with supply chain members, from farmers to processing firms to food banks. Qualitative analysis provides detailed insights on three stages of supply chain resilience: anticipating, adapting and responding, and recovery and learning. Our qualitative analysis shows that the responses to the trade war built resilience during the pandemic by leveraging dynamic capabilities, frugal innovation, social capital, and public/private partnerships. From the specific insights for food banks emerged broader insights for business-to-business markets, in the form of twelve propositions for building supply chain resilience to high impact disruptions.