Cold chain inventory management vs cold chain logistics: what's the difference?

Cold chain logistics refers to the physical movement and handling of temperature-sensitive goods: refrigerated trucks, cold storage warehouses, temperature monitoring, and the routing and scheduling that keeps a shipment within its required range from origin to destination. Cold chain inventory management is the planning layer that sits above that: deciding how much to produce, when to replenish, how much safety stock to hold, and how to allocate available cold storage capacity across products and channels.

The two are closely linked, since a logistics network can only execute the plan inventory management hands it, and inventory decisions are only as good as the physical network's real constraints, such as available freezer capacity, transit times and temperature control reliability. In practice, the companies that struggle most tend to be the ones where these two functions are planned by different teams using different tools and rarely comparing notes, since a logistics constraint discovered after the inventory plan is set almost always costs more to fix than one built into the plan from the start.