A Thematic Review on Using Food Delivery Services during the Pandemic: Insights for the Post-COVID-19 Era.

The food delivery service is the most typical and visible example of online-to-offline (O2O) commerce. More consumers are using food delivery services for various reasons during the COVID-19 pandemic, making this business model viral worldwide. In the post-pandemic era, offering food delivery services will become the new normal for restaurants. Although a growing number of publications have focused on consumer behavior in this issue, no review paper has addressed current research and industry trends. Thus, this paper aims to review the literature published from 2020 to the present (October 2022) on consumers' use of food delivery services during the pandemic. A thematic review was conducted, with 40 articles searched from Scopus and Web of Science being included. Quantitative findings showed current research trends, and thematic analyses formed eight themes of factors influencing consumer behavior: (1) technical and utilitarian factors, (2) system-related attributes, (3) emotional and hedonic factors, (4) individual characteristics, (5) service quality, (6) risk-related factors, (7) social factors, and (8) food-related attributes. The paper also emphasizes COVID-19-related influences and suggests promising future research directions. The results offer insights into industry practices and starting points for future research.

Determinants of Business Resilience in the Restaurant Industry During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Textual Analytics Study on an O2O Platform Case

Understanding the resilience capabilities of restaurant operations and the determinants affecting these capabilities is critical to helping restaurants overcome the hardships owing to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This article adopts a textual analytics approach to scientifically measure consumption trends and identify the shock to restaurant sales using online customer review data from Dianping.com (an O2O platform in China). Moreover, the article proposes a theoretical model of business resilience for the restaurant industry in the context of the pandemic. Then, an empirical investigation on how the determinants in our theoretical framework affect the resilience of restaurant business operations using the panel logit model is conducted. Our findings indicate that the pandemic has severely disrupted the full-service restaurants as compared to the quick-service restaurants. We identify four determinants of resilience, namely social capital (i.e., restaurant rating), physical capital (i.e., contactless service), economic capital (i.e., chain operation), and natural capital (e.g., location), which are significantly associated with the resilience of restaurant business during the pandemic. These four determinants play different roles in the resilience of full-service and quick-service restaurants. The findings of this study have theoretical contribution and generate some important managerial implications for helping the restaurant industry recover from disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. IEEE