FEATURE: Indian businessman exporting fresh Japanese vegetables, fish

by air+

TOKYO, Sept. 19 Kyodo -
An Indian entrepreneur has launched a business to air freight Japanese
vegetables and fish to other parts of Asia, keeping the products fresh using a
special refrigerant.
The service has been attracting an increasing number of Japanese agricultural
cooperatives and catalog retailers of organic vegetables that are eager to tap
into the growing popularity of Japanese produce among the region's wealthy.
Pankaj Garg, 44, president of Innovation Thru Energy Co., a venture company in
Tokyo's Marunouchi business district, launched the service in August in a
tie-up with Japan Airlines Corp.
Acting as the coolant is the ''ice battery,'' which can maintain a constant
temperature for much longer than dry ice by using multiple refrigerant plates.
The battery works like a ''cooling pillow'' used to provide relief to someone
with a fever. Prior to shipping, it is cooled in a freezer.
Garg majored in information technology at an Indian university and came to
Japan in 1988 to work for a major steel company. He acquired an appreciation
for Japanese food culture when he ate sliced raw tuna for the first time.
As the years went by, he began to wonder why the producers of such tasty
produce often led such hard lives.
From the steel company he then moved to the Japanese subsidiary of Intel Corp.,
a major U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, and studied technology for cooling a
personal computer's central processing unit.
It was in 2006 that he came upon the ice battery system developed by a
Taiwanese research institute and decided to create a system to enable Japanese
producers to export their products to first-class hotels and well-off Asian
consumers.
JAL, which as part of its reconstruction efforts is aiming to develop the
business of transporting high-class foodstuff by air, took note of Garg. In the
summer of 2009, Japan Airlines International Co. came calling.
Ryuhei Nomoto, manager of the company's marketing division, was initially
skeptical of the ice battery's reliability. But an experiment proved that the
preset temperature inside the storage box containing the battery could be
maintained even in flight, where temperature differentials are pronounced.
Nomoto said, ''The difference with dry ice is evident. I was surprised.''
Through a process of trial and error, it is now possible to keep the preset
temperature constant for up to 120 hours.
Garg said that in future he would like to create a logistics network in his
home country using the ice battery.
''I want to address children's health problems by delivering foodstuffs and
medical vaccines while keeping them fresh,'' Garg said.
(ITE's phone number is 81-3-3287-7327. The e-mail address is info@ithrue.com)
==Kyodo
2010-09-19 22:17:27