ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that food supply chains are the most critical component of economic and human activities. It has also created a lot of interest among researchers, practitioners and policymakers to study the significant challenges of the food supply chain caused by the pandemic. Therefore this work wanted to investigate the critical supply chain challenges due to Covid-19 with the help of a systematic literature review of well-established articles published in interdisciplinary journals. The selection of thirty one papers was made through a research protocol that helped select and identify research papers which were coded with the help of qualitative software Atlasti 9.0 to study which supply chain challenge amongst disruption, forecasting and inventory was most prominently studied in the literature. Results of software coding revealed that disruption was coded 170 times whereas forecasting 10 times and inventory 37 times as challenges of food Supply Chain Management (SCM). Therefore, it was concluded that most of the researchers considered disruption as one of the significant food supply chain challenges. Further coding also revealed that lockdown and labour related issues were the primary reasons for food supply chain disruption.