Supply chain resilience in the Scottish beef supply chain (SBSC)

The Scottish Beef Supply Chain (SBSC) is a cornerstone of the national rural economy, contributing over £1 billion and sustaining a globally recognised brand. However, this critical sector faces an existential threat from persistent challenges, evidenced by a 14.7% decline in national cattle production over the last decade, coupled with chronic labour shortages, succession constraints, and critically low profitability. Safeguarding the viability of the SBSC is therefore a matter of urgent economic and policy importance. While prior agri-food research has addressed resilience in response to acute disruptions (e.g. disease outbreaks and extreme weather events), a significant theoretical gap remains in understanding how resilience functions as a system-level dynamic capability that responds to enduring systemic challenges within decentralised, multi-tier supply chains.
A qualitative, holistic multiple-case study design was adopted, with the supply chain comprising farmers, processors, auction marts, and retailers treated as the unit of analysis. Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with key supply chain actors, policymakers, and industry bodies. The data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.
The findings indicate that SBSC resilience is underpinned by several capability areas, including traceability, inherent resilience, supplier relationship management, supplier selection, supply base diversity, transparency, logistical capabilities, redundancy, and government support. However, the analysis demonstrates that these capabilities are constrained by enduring challenges such as declining herd sizes, labour shortages, succession constraints, low profitability, regulatory uncertainty, limited technological adoption, market volatility, and trust-related issues. Collectively, these challenges weaken the SBSC’s ability to identify emerging risks, implement timely responses, and pursue longer-term adaptive change.
The study makes three main contributions. First, it introduces an updated definition of agri-food supply chain resilience that incorporates both acute disruptions and long-term systemic pressures. Second, it extends the Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV) by demonstrating that the sequential stages of sensing, seizing, and transforming have limited applicability at the supply chain level; consequently, a collective sensing, seizing, and transforming approach is proposed. Third, it provides empirical evidence of how resilience capabilities manifest within a decentralised, multi-actor agri-food system an area that remains under-represented in the current literature.
Overall, the research offers theoretically grounded insights into supply chain-level resilience and identifies key areas for policy and industry intervention aimed at strengthening the long-term functionality of the SBSC.