Energy-Efficiency Actions in Food Cold Chains: A Systematic Review of Refrigeration, Logistics, Digital Monitoring and Collaborative Implementation

Food cold chains rely on refrigeration, cold storage, refrigerated transport, packaging and monitoring systems that consume electricity and fuel while preserving food safety, quality and shelf life. Although many studies propose energy-saving technologies or optimization models for individual cold-chain operations, less is known about how energy-efficiency actions are distributed across refrigeration, logistics and digital monitoring domains, which actors must collaborate to implement them, and which benefits and barriers shape adoption. This paper presents a systematic literature review supported by bibliometric and structured content analysis. Searches in Scopus and Web of Science identified 3930 records before deduplication. After removing out-of-year records and duplicates, 2368 unique records were screened; 896 reports were sought for full-text assessment; 751 reports were retrieved and assessed; 466 studies were included in the final review corpus; and 408 were coded as an applied/action corpus. The synthesis identifies ten energy-efficiency action families, seven cold-chain stage classes, multi-actor configurations, evidence types, collaboration-intensity levels, energy benefits, non-energy benefits and implementation barriers. Transport, routing and distribution is the largest action family (134 records), followed by cold storage and refrigeration technology (66), digital monitoring and information sharing (58), life-cycle assessment, energy assessment and decision support (36), energy systems and renewable cooling (34), packaging and thermal insulation (33), and inventory, and planning and coordination (27). The findings show that food cold-chain energy efficiency is not only a technical refrigeration problem but also a collaborative implementation challenge: many actions require information sharing, coordinated operating decisions, joint investment, data governance or cost/benefit-sharing mechanisms. The review contributes an action-oriented framework that links energy-saving actions to stages, actors, collaboration requirements, benefits and barriers, and it identifies future research priorities on comparable energy metrics, measured savings, renewable cooling, digital twins, demand-side flexibility and governance of collaborative energy-efficiency investments.