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Agri-food supply chains are increasingly exposed to overlapping disruptions arising from climate variability, geopolitical instability, pandemic effects, price volatility, labour shortages, and changing consumer demand. These pressures have intensified interest in resilience-oriented technologies that can help supply chains anticipate disruption, absorb shocks, adapt operations, and recover service continuity. Artificial intelligence has emerged as a prominent candidate because it can transform fragmented supply chain data into forecasts, alerts, recommendations, and operational decisions. This systematic review examines how artificial intelligence is being applied to strengthen agri-food supply chain resilience. The review focuses on four functional domains: forecasting, traceability, risk detection, and decision support. It asks whether current AI applications merely improve isolated technical tasks or whether they provide demonstrable evidence of resilience improvement across agri-food supply systems. The review follows a systematic design informed by PRISMA reporting principles and structured literature review procedures. A corpus of 32 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2017 and 2025 was synthesised. The selected studies cover AI forecasting models, blockchain-enabled traceability, quality and safety monitoring, logistics optimisation, supply chain decision support, and review-methodology guidance. The synthesis shows that forecasting research is technically advanced, especially in price prediction, demand forecasting, and quality-sensitive perishable supply chain management. Traceability and risk detection studies show strong growth around blockchain, IoT, big data, computer vision, and food safety monitoring. Decision support research connects AI to resilience more directly, but most evidence remains conceptual, model-based, or function-specific rather than validated through real disruption events. The review concludes that AI has substantial potential to support agri-food supply chain resilience, but the evidence base remains fragmented. Existing studies tend to focus on single functions such as forecasting accuracy, provenance visibility, or routing efficiency, while system-level resilience outcomes are rarely measured. Future research should therefore move from isolated AI applications toward integrated, empirically validated, resilience-focused agri-food intelligence systems.

Ensuring food quality, safety, and authenticity has become a central challenge for contemporary food systems because risks now emerge across production, processing, distribution, retail, and consumption. Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to interpret complex food data, including spectral signals, images, sensor outputs, molecular profiles, traceability records, and supply-chain alerts. These developments suggest that AI can support a shift from reactive food inspection toward predictive and preventive food integrity assurance. Despite this promise, AI applications in food quality, safety, and authenticity often remain separated across disciplinary and technological domains. Sensing studies focus on detection accuracy, prediction studies focus on model performance, traceability studies focus on chain-of-custody infrastructure, and explainable AI studies focus on interpretability. This fragmentation limits the field’s ability to understand how these components could function together as an integrated assurance system. This integrative review synthesises 31 peer-reviewed articles published between 2017 and 2025 across food science, analytical chemistry, sensing technology, food informatics, and artificial intelligence. The review examines four interconnected domains: sensing technologies and data sources, prediction models for quality and safety, traceability and authenticity verification, and explainable decision systems. Its purpose is not to report new empirical data, but to integrate diverse research streams into a coherent conceptual understanding of AI-enabled food integrity assurance. The review shows that AI has already demonstrated value in optical sensing, spectroscopy, imaging, authenticity testing, shelf-life prediction, risk assessment, fraud detection, and traceability analysis. However, most applications are still designed as isolated models rather than as connected decision systems. Three tables classify sensing technologies, categorise prediction models, and present an integrative framework linking detection, prediction, provenance, and explainable decisions. The central conclusion is that the technical components of AI-enabled food integrity assurance already exist, but they remain insufficiently integrated. Future research should move beyond stand-alone classification or prediction models and toward interoperable, explainable, and operationally validated systems. Such systems should connect sensing, prediction, traceability, and human decision-making across food supply chains.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being embedded in agri-food supply chains through applications such as automated quality grading, risk scoring, demand forecasting, logistics optimisation, pricing analytics, and food safety alerts. These systems promise efficiency, resilience, and improved decision support, but they also reshape how decisions are made and who is affected by them. In food systems, AI governance is not only a technical issue but also a matter of safety, fairness, market access, and public trust. Existing responsible AI principles provide important normative foundations, including fairness, transparency, accountability, human oversight, and social benefit. However, these principles are often framed at a general level and do not fully address the distinctive structure of agri-food supply chains. Food chains are fragmented across farms, processors, logistics providers, retailers, technology platforms, regulators, and consumers, which makes governance more complex than in single-organisation AI deployment. This article develops a domain-specific Responsible AI Governance Framework for agri-food supply chains. The framework integrates four pillars: transparency, accountability, traceability, and human oversight. It argues that responsible AI in food must make algorithmic decisions visible, assign responsibility across distributed actors, preserve auditable records, and ensure meaningful human safeguards for high-risk decisions. The proposed framework specifies transparency requirements for different AI applications, maps accountability responsibilities across supply chain actors, connects traceability systems to auditability, and defines human oversight mechanisms for safety-critical and livelihood-sensitive decisions. Three tables operationalise the framework through transparency requirements, accountability allocation, and integrated governance mechanisms. The article concludes that responsible AI in food requires governance that is as distributed, interconnected, and safety-conscious as the supply chains it seeks to guide.

Food systems are increasingly embedding algorithmic traceability systems that combine blockchain infrastructures, AI-supported verification, IoT sensors, QR-enabled disclosure, and digital chain-of-custody tools. These systems are commonly promoted as instruments of transparency, fraud prevention, and consumer reassurance. Their deeper theoretical significance, however, lies in the way they reorganise the social foundations through which food becomes trusted. Existing approaches to food trust often emphasise interpersonal confidence, brand reputation, certification labels, and institutional credibility. Yet these approaches do not fully explain what happens when trust claims are mediated by automated records, distributed ledgers, sensor-generated evidence, and platform-based verification interfaces. The central problem addressed in this article is whether algorithmic traceability merely increases information or whether it changes the nature of food trust itself. This article develops an original theory of algorithmic food trust transformation. It argues that algorithmic traceability shifts food trust from a relational and reputational regime toward a system-mediated regime organised around visibility, verification, and institutional confidence. The article does not report new empirical data; instead, it builds theory by synthesising research on food trust, traceability, blockchain, digital transparency, certification, consumer behaviour, and food governance. The proposed theory identifies three sequential mechanisms. Algorithmic visibility makes selected aspects of the supply chain seeable; verification converts food claims into auditable assertions; and institutional confidence encourages consumers and market actors to rely on the functioning of technical and regulatory systems rather than on direct personal knowledge. These mechanisms do not eliminate trust, but they relocate it from persons and brands toward infrastructures, platforms, certifiers, and governance arrangements. The article contributes to food sociology and trust studies by showing that algorithmic traceability is not simply a technical improvement in supply chain information. It rewires the foundations of food trust and creates new vulnerabilities linked to data integrity, institutional legitimacy, platform control, and the opacity of verification systems. The theory therefore calls for a more critical understanding of digital food trust as a sociotechnical achievement rather than a natural consequence of transparency.

Food system transparency has become a defining demand of contemporary food governance as consumers, regulators, producers, retailers, and civil society seek clearer information about food safety, sustainability, provenance, and accountability. Yet transparency is still frequently reduced to traceability, understood as the capacity to follow a product through production, processing, distribution, and retail. Traceability remains essential because it can support food safety, provenance verification, recall management, and supply-chain visibility. However, it offers only a partial view of the decisions, data practices, and governance arrangements that increasingly shape food systems. The central problem is that traceability can show where food has been without explaining why food-system decisions are made, who benefits from data use, how algorithmic judgements are produced, or how affected stakeholders can question decisions. As artificial intelligence, digital platforms, automated decision support, blockchain systems, and data-intensive infrastructures become more embedded in food systems, transparency must include decision logic as well as product movement. A narrow traceability model may increase visibility while leaving power asymmetries, accountability gaps, and ethical risks unresolved. Transparency therefore needs to be reframed as a broader socio-technical condition. This Perspective Article argues that food system transparency must move beyond conventional traceability toward explainable, participatory, and ethics-centred AI. Explainable AI can make algorithmic decisions more understandable to producers, regulators, firms, consumers, and affected communities. Participatory design can ensure that transparency systems reflect stakeholder needs, rights, and lived realities rather than only institutional or commercial priorities. Ethics-centred governance can connect technical transparency with fairness, accountability, privacy, contestability, and public trust. The article contributes a conceptual framework for reimagining food system transparency as understandable, contestable, inclusive, accountable, and sustainability-oriented. It positions AI not merely as a tool for monitoring food supply chains but also as a governance object that must itself be explained, scrutinised, and democratically shaped. The proposed perspective highlights practical implications for food businesses, technology developers, policymakers, regulators, and civil society organisations. It concludes that transparent AI can support more trustworthy food systems only when traceability is integrated with explanation, participation, ethical responsibility, and accountable decision-making.