Research and policy for the food-delivery revolution.

Implications for nutrition, environment, and work may be considerable.

COVID-19's impacts on incomes and food consumption in urban and rural areas are surprisingly similar: Evidence from five African countries.

African governments imposed mobility restrictions to suppress the spread of COVID-19. Many observers feared these measures would dramatically decrease incomes and increase food insecurity and anticipated that urban households would be much more impacted than rural ones. We use rural and urban survey data from 4000 households across five African countries to assess the pandemic's effect on incomes and food consumption. We find that a large share of the population saw incomes drop between March and July 2020. But these decreases were 43-63% smaller than predictions and early estimates, and highly correlated with the severity of restrictions. The income and food consumption impacts of the COVID-19 shock were widespread over both rural and urban areas. Policy making during a pandemic should recognize that restrictive measures will affect rural and urban, farming and non-farming, and richer and poorer households.

"Pivoting" by food industry firms to cope with COVID-19 in developing regions: E-commerce and "copivoting" delivery intermediaries.

Coronavirus disease 2019 and related lockdown policies in 2020 shocked food industry firms' supply chains in developing regions. Firms "pivoted" to e-commerce to reach consumers and e-procurement to reach processors and farmers. "Delivery intermediaries" copivoted with food firms to help them deliver and procure. This was crucial to the ability of the food firms to pivot. The pandemic was a "crucible" that induced this set of fast-tracking innovations, accelerating the diffusion of e-commerce and delivery intermediaries, and enabling food industry firms to redesign, at least temporarily, and perhaps for the long term, their supply chains to be more resilient, and to weather the pandemic, supply consumers, and contribute to food security. We present a theoretical model to explain these firm strategies, and then apply the framework to classify firms' practical strategies. We focus on cases in Asia and Latin America. Enabling policy and infrastructural conditions allowed firms to pivot and copivot fluidly.