Journal of Food Distribution Research

About Journal of Food Distribution Research

Journal of Food Distribution Research: A Profile of an Applied Agribusiness Journal

The Journal of Food Distribution Research (JFDR) is a refereed, open-access scholarly journal devoted to how food moves from producers and processors through wholesale and retail systems to consumers, and to the economics that govern that movement. It is managed and published by the Food Distribution Research Society, Inc. (FDRS) in the United States, and the society states that it has managed and published the journal since 1969. That long society stewardship is the defining fact about this title. JFDR is not a commercial mega-journal and it is not a general agriculture outlet. It is the journal of a specialist professional society, with an applied, problem-oriented focus on issues of importance facing the United States agribusiness economic sector, and its readers are principally agricultural and business economists who work on distribution, marketing and food-system questions.

The bibliographic identity anchored in this Journals World record is the single ISSN 2643-3354. Aggregator records that reproduce Scopus and SCImago data list the same single ISSN, the publisher as the Food Distribution Research Society, the country as the United States, and subject areas spanning agricultural and biological sciences, business, management and accounting, and decision sciences. Whether that ISSN is formally designated print or electronic in the ISSN register could not be verified from the sources obtained for this profile, so this profile treats it simply as the journal's ISSN, exactly as the record and the aggregators present it. Authors checking a citation should match title, society publisher and that ISSN together; any listing that attaches a different publisher or a different ISSN to this title should be treated with caution.

History and Society Roots

The Food Distribution Research Society presents JFDR as a journal it has managed and published since 1969. That date matters because it separates the journal's real age from its much shorter history in some commercial databases. Secondary services that draw on Scopus commonly show coverage beginning in 2019. That is a statement about when Scopus-indexed coverage is recorded in those services, not about when the journal began. A journal can publish for decades through a learned society, circulate through specialist libraries and repositories such as AgEcon Search, and only later acquire the kind of structured Scopus coverage that aggregator websites display. Readers who see a 2019 start date on a metrics site and conclude that JFDR is a new journal would be misreading the evidence.

The society model also explains the journal's editorial character. Society journals typically serve a defined research community that meets, presents and argues in person, and JFDR is explicitly connected to the FDRS annual conference. The society explains that, since 2024, the March, July and November issues contain refereed articles, and that presenters of research reports from the previous annual FDRS conference are invited to submit complete manuscripts for consideration in a conference special issue or a subsequent issue. The conference issue has an expedited review process, although acceptance and publication timing still depend on authors adequately addressing editorial feedback. This is a recognisable society pipeline: conference presentation, invited full submission, refereeing, and publication in the society's own journal.

Back issues and the complete JFDR library are held through AgEcon Search, the agricultural and applied economics repository maintained at the University of Minnesota, and through EconPapers, part of the RePEc network. That repository presence is part of the journal's scholarly infrastructure. For applied economists, a paper that is freely readable, preserved in a disciplinary repository and discoverable through RePEc and EconLit-style searching may matter as much in practice as a commercial database listing, because the audience for food distribution research habitually searches those repositories first.

Aims, Scope and Subject Coverage

The society's own statement of aim and scope is precise. JFDR has, in its words, an applied, problem-oriented focus on issues of importance facing the United States agribusiness economic sector. Its emphasis is on the flow of products and services through the food wholesale and retail distribution system. Around that core, the society names related areas of interest: patterns of consumption; impacts of technology on processing and manufacturing; packaging and transport; data and information systems in the food and agricultural industry; market development; financial issues in agribusiness; and international trade in food products and agricultural commodities. Business applications and agricultural and applied economic applications are encouraged.

Each element of that scope deserves unpacking, because together they describe a very specific intellectual territory. The flow of products through wholesale and retail distribution covers the intermediaries that most food economics ignores: distributors, wholesalers, brokers, retail buyers, category managers and logistics providers. A JFDR paper might ask how a retailer sources fresh produce, how a wholesale market responds to a supply shock, or how consolidation among distributors changes the prices farmers receive and consumers pay. Consumption patterns bring the demand side in — how households buy food, how preferences shift, and how those shifts feed back into ordering, assortment and waste decisions inside distribution firms.

Technology in processing and manufacturing, packaging and transport, and data and information systems form a second cluster. Food distribution is a physical business transformed by information: electronic data interchange, scanner data, cold-chain monitoring, traceability systems and forecasting software all change who holds power in the chain and where margin accumulates. JFDR welcomes work that studies those changes as economic phenomena rather than as engineering. Market development, agribusiness finance and international trade in food products form a third cluster, connecting the domestic distribution system to export markets, import supply and the financial constraints of firms that operate on thin margins and perishable inventory.

Secondary subject classifications agree with this picture. Services reproducing SCImago data classify the journal in Agronomy and Crop Science, Economics and Econometrics, Food Science, Management Science and Operations Research, and Marketing, each in the fourth quartile in the readings obtained for this profile. Those five categories look scattered until they are read through the distribution lens: distribution research sits exactly where agricultural production economics, food science, marketing and operations meet. Authors should read that classification as confirmation of fit, not as an invitation to submit general agronomy, general food chemistry or general marketing work with no distribution content. The journal's centre of gravity is the movement and marketing of food, studied economically.

Methods the Journal Welcomes

The society states which methodologies JFDR will consider: survey research; review and critique; analysis and synthesis of previous research; econometric or other statistical analysis; and case studies. Editors also explicitly encourage Harvard-style teaching cases, with separate teaching case study guidelines in the journal's instructions for submission. That last point is unusual and revealing. A journal that publishes teaching cases is speaking to faculty who teach agribusiness and food marketing, and it treats a well-constructed classroom case — a real firm, a real decision, data that force a choice — as a scholarly contribution in its own right.

For prospective authors, the methodological list is a practical filter. A purely theoretical model with no application to a food distribution problem is a weak fit. A laboratory food-science experiment with no market, firm or consumer dimension is a weak fit. By contrast, an econometric study of retail pricing, a survey of distributor practices, a synthesis of evidence on food loss in the supply chain, or a case study of a cooperative's market development strategy all sit squarely inside the stated remit. The society adds one further criterion that should shape every submission: potential usefulness to a broad range of agricultural and business economists is an important criterion for publication. Narrow technical novelty alone is not the test; usefulness to the field's practitioners and teachers is.

Publishing Model, Frequency and Access

JFDR is refereed and is published three times each year by the society. The society states plainly that JFDR is an open-access journal and that published articles are made freely available under licensing that allows them to be read, copied, re-distributed and re-used. For authors, that model has concrete consequences. There is no paywall between a JFDR article and the extension specialists, industry analysts, teachers and policy staff who form much of its natural readership. Work published here can be assigned in courses, circulated in industry briefings and deposited in repositories without permission barriers, which suits a field where research value is realised when practitioners actually use it.

Issues on special topics may be published at the request of others or on the editor's initiative, in addition to the conference-linked special issue described above. Special issues in a small society journal are typically substantive rather than promotional: they gather a community around a defined problem, such as a disruption in food supply chains or a change in retail structure, and they are refereed to the journal's standard. Authors responding to a special-issue invitation should still expect the normal expectation that manuscripts address editorial feedback adequately before acceptance and publication timing are settled.

One figure is not published in the sources obtained for this profile: the journal does not publicly disclose a general acceptance rate or a standard review timeline on its society journal page, and no article processing charge is stated there — consistent with a society open-access model, but authors who need a formal statement of charges, licensing terms or timelines for a funder should obtain it directly from the society before submitting, rather than assuming it. The society page names a contact for journal information; Kirche Rogers is listed there as the contact for more information about the journal.

Indexing and Discoverability

The society states that articles in JFDR are indexed or catalogued in AgEcon Search, Google Scholar, RePEc, EconPapers, Scopus, IDEAS and CAB International. That list is worth reading carefully because it mixes three different kinds of infrastructure. Scopus and CAB International (through its agricultural databases) are curated abstracting and indexing services; inclusion there signals that the journal passed an external selection process. AgEcon Search, RePEc, EconPapers and IDEAS are the discovery backbone of applied economics, where working papers, journal articles and citations circulate among economists daily. Google Scholar provides broad crawl-based discoverability across all of it.

A Directory of Open Access Journals listing for this title could not be verified from the DOAJ search output obtained for this profile. That absence from one search output is not proof about the journal's status in any directory, and authors for whom a DOAJ listing is a funder requirement should check the directory directly at the time of submission. What can be said on the evidence in hand is that the journal's open-access status rests on the society's own statement, and its curated-index standing rests principally on Scopus and CAB coverage as listed by the society and reflected in aggregator records.

Metrics and How to Read Them

JFDR is a small, specialist journal, and its metrics are correspondingly modest; this profile reports them with attribution rather than dressing them up. Services reproducing SCImago and Scopus data place the journal in the fourth quartile (Q4) across its subject categories in the readings obtained. One such service reported a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.19 for the period it covered through 2024, with an h-index of 6, while a later reading reported an SJR of 0.150 for 2025 and an h-index of 7, alongside a 2025 impact figure of 0.320, down from 0.530 in 2024. These are aggregator-reported figures derived from Scopus and Journal Citation Reports data, not publisher claims, and they move from year to year; the honest summary is that JFDR sits in Q4 with an h-index in the single digits and citation rates typical of a narrow applied field.

An OpenAlex source record matched on the journal's ISSN, re-verified repeatedly for this profile after earlier lookups returned a divergent duplicate record, recorded 124 works and 175 citations, an OpenAlex h-index of 7, the Food Distribution Research Society as host organisation, a first publication year of 1969 that corroborates the society's own history, and both this record's ISSN 2643-3354 and an older ISSN, 0047-245X, on the same source. OpenAlex counts shift as its source records are rebuilt and split, so those figures should be treated as a guide to the journal's indexed footprint in that record — a compact body of works, cited modestly — rather than as a permanent total. Read together, the Scopus-based and OpenAlex pictures agree on the essential point: this is a compact literature, in which individual well-placed papers on distribution problems can be genuinely influential within the field even though global citation totals are small.

Prospective authors should therefore judge JFDR by fit and audience rather than by metric chasing. If a manuscript's contribution is a distribution, marketing or agribusiness result that United States food-system economists should read, this journal puts it directly in front of that community, openly and permanently, through the repositories that community uses. If a manuscript needs a high-quartile general economics or food science venue to satisfy a promotion rule, JFDR's Q4 standing — reported here without exaggeration — means it will not serve that purpose, and authors should weigh that honestly before submitting.

Who Should Submit, and How to Decide

The strongest candidates for JFDR are manuscripts that begin from a real distribution problem: a change in how food is wholesaled, retailed, transported, packaged, financed or traded, studied with survey, statistical, econometric, synthetic or case methods, and written so that other agricultural and business economists can use the result. Teaching cases built to Harvard-style conventions are explicitly welcome, which makes JFDR a rare natural home for scholarship of teaching in agribusiness. Conference presenters at the FDRS annual meeting have a defined route into the journal through the conference special issue and subsequent issues, with an expedited process for the conference issue but no lowering of the requirement to respond to refereeing.

Before submitting, authors should do three practical checks. First, read recent March, July and November issues through the society site and the AgEcon Search library to confirm that the manuscript's question, methods and tone match what the journal actually publishes. Second, follow the journal's Instructions for Submission exactly, including the separate guidance for teaching cases where relevant; society journals return non-compliant manuscripts just as commercial journals do. Third, verify the journal's current indexing, licensing and any charge position directly with the society if an institution or funder requires documentary proof, because those administrative details are not fully published on the journal page and can change between submission cycles.

Verifying This Journal

Verification is straightforward. The journal's home is the Food Distribution Research Society website, which carries the aim and scope, the indexing list, the open-access statement, the publication pattern and the back-issue route through AgEcon Search and EconPapers. The ISSN 2643-3354, the society publisher and the United States base should agree across the society site, Scopus-derived listings and library catalogues. Disagreement on any of those three points — a site using this title with a different ISSN, a publisher other than the Food Distribution Research Society demanding fees in the society's name, or a clone site outside the society's domain — is a warning sign that should stop a submission until the society has confirmed the channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes the Journal of Food Distribution Research? The Food Distribution Research Society, Inc., a United States society, which states it has managed and published the journal since 1969.

What is the journal's ISSN? 2643-3354, the single ISSN carried in this record and in Scopus-derived aggregator listings.

Is the journal open access? Yes. The society states that JFDR is an open-access journal and that articles are freely available for reading, copying, re-distribution and re-use under its licensing.

How often does it appear? Three times a year; since 2024 the March, July and November issues contain the refereed articles, with conference-linked special content drawn from the society's annual meeting.

Where is it indexed? The society lists AgEcon Search, Google Scholar, RePEc, EconPapers, Scopus, IDEAS and CAB International.

What are its metrics? Aggregator readings obtained for this profile place it in Q4 in its Scopus subject categories, with an h-index of 7 in the most recent reading and an SJR around 0.15 to 0.19 across recent years. Figures vary by source and year and should be checked live for formal use.

What kinds of papers does it want? Applied, problem-oriented work on food distribution — surveys, reviews and critiques, syntheses, econometric and statistical analyses, case studies, and Harvard-style teaching cases — judged importantly by usefulness to agricultural and business economists.

In summary, the Journal of Food Distribution Research is a long-running society journal with a narrow, clearly stated mission: to study, openly and usefully, how food is distributed and marketed. Its metrics are modest and are reported here as such. Its value lies in focus, longevity since 1969, repository permanence and direct access to the applied economics community that works on the food system every day.