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Food banks play an increasingly important role in society by mitigating hunger and helping needy people; however, research aimed at improving food bank operations is limited.

This systematic review used Web of Science and Scopus as search engines, which are extensive databases in Operations Research and Management Science. Ninety-five articles regarding food bank operations were deeply analyzed to contribute to this literature review.

Through a systematic literature review, this paper identifies the challenges faced by food banks from an operations management perspective and positions the scientific contributions proposed to address these challenges.

This study makes three main contributions to the current literature. First, this study provides new researchers with an overview of the key features of food bank operations. Second, this study identifies and classifies the proposed optimization models to support food bank managers with decision-making. Finally, this study discusses the challenges of food bank operations and proposes promising future research avenues.