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Amid a severe shortage of trucking capacity in Japan due to labor shortages and logistical inefficiencies, two of the country’s largest seafood corporations, Nissui and Maruha Nichiro, are hard at work with three frozen food corporations, Nichirei , Ajinomoto Frozen Foods and TableMark, to identify a new logistics system.
“The frozen food industry faces unique challenges, such as employee workload due to low-temperature environments and the need to control product temperatures in limited garage space,” Maruha Nichiro told SeafoodSource. “In this context, it is vital to take measures (. . . ) to improve charging efficiency. “
This partnership is not intended to address existing challenges, but corporations are continually looking to build on this foundation to find effective tactics to solve long-term problems, such as reducing manual handling of goods and greenhouse fuel emissions.
However, existing issues continue to hamper the chain’s power in Japan.
The trucking industry is facing a labor shortage, with truckers on the run lately having to wait in long lines to load their trucks.
Some in the food industry have dubbed the shortage of hard work “the challenge of 2024,” and it stems primarily from a government protection law that restricts truck drivers in Japan to 960 hours per year, or about 18 hours per week, starting in April. 2024.
In addition to the fact that this measure has reduced road transport capacity in the short term, it is expected that fewer young people will join this career in the future.
With no end in sight to the shortage of trucking capacity, delays and disruptions in the origin chain will most likely continue, affecting everything from groceries to manufactured goods. The Tokyo-founded Nomura think tank estimates that, based on existing handling methods, the domestic logistics formula could not cover about 28% of planned deliveries until 2025, and that percentage could rise to about 35% until 2030.
To mitigate some of those problems, the five-company partnership aims to increase truck loading rates and productivity at logistics sites, which would stabilize the entire source chain network and ease the burden on truckers and logistics companies.
The plan promotes the introduction…
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Chris Loew reports from Osaka, Japan, as editor-in-chief of SeafoodSource. com. In addition to writing for SeafoodSource. com, he covers Japan for Global Investing’s inventory investing newsletter. He is co-author of an educational text titled “English for Healthcare: Read It, Write It, and Speak It. “When he writes, he proofreads the translations from Japanese to English. Chris is a 1990 graduate of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. After graduating, he worked for two years in the purchasing department. of a Japanese meat importer and for five years as an export manager for two Seattle food companies, promoting consumers in the Far East and arranging shipping and export documents for combination boxes of frozen foods.
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