Study of issues in cold chain using fuzzy environment

Owing to the presence of numerous issues in a developing nation like India the cold supply chain of frozen food products is not performing effectively leading to losses and wastage of food products. It therefore becomes imperative to identify and evaluate these issues. With that as an aim, this study categorized issues into seven main categories based on detailed literature review and expert interviews. DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory), AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), and FAHP (Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process) are the multi-criteria decision-making methods applied to conduct ranking of issues in order of their criticality and importance. The results demonstrate that the infrastructural, awareness & handling practices issues are found to be the two most critical issues. Safety & Quality and Responsiveness are categorized as Influenced issues, while the other issues are Influencing issues. In order to confirm the steadiness of the rankings, sensitivity analysis was conducted. The study will help the cold chain partners understand the criticality of the issues.