Establishing a Sustainable Business Model in Cold Chain Industry – Using Nichirei Corp. as an Example

With a rapid growth in cold chain industry, consumers become more demanding in the quality of the service and product delivered. The recurring food safe incidents due to uncontrolled cold chain also raise Government’s as well as NGO’s attention and accelerate the establishment of several important regulations and standards such as GDP, GMP, ISO, HACCP and many more to standardize the cold chain system in order to provide business guidelines on good practice as well as strengthen consumer’s trust in the product and service they purchase. But, what constitute to a qualified cold chain system? This research paper will centralize on business perspective with linkage to regulations and standards and consumer’s expectation to discover what are key successful factors for a sustainable and profitable business model in cold chain industry. A case company, Nichirei Corp., will be introduced in the later chapter to illustrate the proposed business model as it can be set as a role model for all the service providers in the industry. However, even though a qualified system can be put in practice in real practice, it is not widely implemented. This is due to several limitations, which will be discussed with recommendation to counter these limitations