SMEs' strategies for dealing with the Covid-19 emergency: a case study in the Italian food industry

The spread of COVID-19 has represented worldwide the biggest health emergency in recent years and has also caused extensive economic damage. It has pushed companies to reinvent themselves and adapt to new circumstances. This paper proposes an exploratory study to investigate the main resilience strategies and entrepreneurship ventures adopted by SMEs in the food industry to cope with the pandemic emergency. A survey was conducted through semi-structured interviews to collect data from 40 SMEs in Campania, an Italian region. A thematic analysis was then employed to analyse the data. Five major themes were identified, and each was addressed in turn, describing how often they come up, what they mean, and including examples from the data as evidence. The results show that most companies have undertaken innovative and digitisation strategies. On the other hand, the study revealed that few firms had adopted solely conservative strategies.