BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR
ORDER FULFILLMENT
strategicinsight
THE JAPANESE ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR HARD WORK AND
long hours on the job. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for mundane
tasks, such as shopping for the weekly groceries. And as people’s
lives grow increasingly busy, sales and home delivery of groceries is
becoming one of the fastest-growing markets for e-commerce in the
Land of the Rising Sun. That’s where a home delivery service like the
one offered by CO-OP Kobe makes life easier.
The Consumer Cooperative Kobe, or CO-OP Kobe, as it’s popularly known, is part of a national co-op network in Japan, which itself is
a member of a large international alliance of consumer cooperatives.
CO-OP Kobe, located in the city of the same name in South Central
Japan, focuses on retail stores and groceries. It operates 163 stores,
most of which are comparable in size to convenience stores in the
U.S. CO-OP Kobe also does a substantial business in home delivery
of groceries and gifts.
CO-OP Kobe operates three logistics streams: store delivery, home delivery of food and consumer
goods, and giftware. The giving of gifts is an important part of Japanese culture, and CO-OP handles
gifts for both individual and corporate use through a separate distribution center and delivery service.
Distribution of food, beverages, and clothing to CO-OP Kobe’s stores is handled from two distribution
centers. And finally, home delivery of food, beverages, and clothing is accomplished through three DCs,
one in Western Kobe and two located in the Uozakihama district of the city. One of those is for dry
(non-refrigerated) goods, while the other, known as the cold storage and fresh center, handles frozen
foods, refrigerated products, and fresh produce. Goods from the two Uozakihama facilities eventually
make their way to 25 “delivery centers,” where they are split into truck routes for home delivery.
The Uozakihama cold storage distribution center, a highly automated 24,000-square-meter
(258,000-square-foot) operation in a two-story building, was built in 2004, but it went through a
major retrofit in 2014 with new technologies that have increased capacity and throughput, says CO-OP
Section Manager Takashi Kusaka. Many of its former systems were replaced with innovative equipment
provided by Daifuku Co. Ltd., including goods-to-person picking, pick-to-light systems, radio-frequen-cy identification (RFID), and other automated systems to speed orders through the building. Some of
A dedicated facility for home delivery of fresh and frozen
groceries in Kobe, Japan, assures that orders are processed
quickly and accurately. Automation is the differentiator.
Fast food—
Japanese style
