Sustainability-oriented innovation in the agri-food system: Current issues and the road ahead

•The paper examines how the agri-food system is currently responding to the grand challenges of sustainability.•It reviews the literature related to sustainability-oriented innovation to identify ways in which the agri-food system could better respond to grand challenges in the future.•It highlights the key contributions of the seven articles in the special issue.•It draws three potential avenues for future research. The agri-food system features prominently in discussions about sustainable development because of its broad economic, social, and environmental impacts. To examine how the agri-food system is responding – and can respond – to the grand challenges of sustainability, we position this Special Issue (SI) within the stream of sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) literature, and in relation to the much-cited framework provided by Adams et al. (2016). This introductory article contains an overview of the selected papers, described by using the above-mentioned framework and by highlighting the contributions that these articles bring to fill current knowledge gaps in the field. Such knowledge gaps have been identified by investigating SOI links to sustainability and circular economy concepts and by studying how SOI relates to development in the agri-food system. The contributions to this SI explore different facets of the research agenda we have laid out and covers the range of SOI proposed by Adams et al. To help the field move forward, we finally identify a few areas as the most relevant for future research.