Customisation Practices and SME Performance: A Systematic Review with Implications for Culinary Enterprises

Abstract

Customisation is increasingly used to align products and services with heterogeneous customer needs, yet evidence on its business value is fragmented across manufacturing, services, digital platforms, and food-service settings, with limited direct evidence for African culinary small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This systematic integrative review synthesised the forms, benefits, risks, and boundary conditions of customisation and assessed their implications for culinary enterprises. ProQuest and ERIC were searched as bibliographic databases, while Google Scholar and ResearchGate were used for supplementary discovery and retrieval. Searches conducted in May 2026 covered English-language, peer-reviewed publications from 2016 to 2026 and followed PRISMA 2020 reporting principles. Of 337 records identified, 36 duplicates were removed, 301 titles and abstracts were screened, 131 full texts were assessed, and 34 records were retained. The evidence comprised quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, review, conceptual, and analytical studies and was synthesised using descriptive frequency analysis and thematic coding. Six forms of customisation were identified, product, service, experience, marketing, digital-interface, and process or delivery customisation. The identified benefits of customisation are: Customer satisfaction, loyalty, engagement, perceived control, or experience appeared in 19 studies, while competitive advantage, differentiation, market penetration, or business growth appeared in 18, while seven studies explicitly reported adverse risk outcomes, including cost escalation, operational complexity, choice overload, privacy concerns, and quality inconsistency. Only 11 of the 34 records directly concerned food, hospitality, restaurants, bakeries, gastronomy, or consumer food experience; 23 provided transferable evidence, and Ghana was the only clearly African country-specific context. Interpretation is further constrained by limited database coverage and the absence of preserved item-level formal quality scores. The review therefore positions customisation as a contingent capability rather than an automatic source of growth and recommends customer-relevant, operationally feasible, clearly guided, and digitally integrated customisation for culinary SMEs.