How a Leading Global Chocolatier Saved $9.3M+ & Retained Market Share with Decision AI
Overview
A leading global chocolatier operating across the world relies on a complex cold chain network to ensure the quality of its products from factories to distribution hubs and retail stores. With over 24,000 temperature-sensitive shipments per month spanning 92 cold chain transport lanes in South Asia, the company faced mounting risks from inconsistent transporter practices, environmental exposures, and limited visibility — especially in such key developing market corridors.
When faced with just 57% cold chain compliance on these key lanes, company leadership confronted a critical decision: either initiate a multimillion-dollar overhaul of its transport infrastructure or find a smarter way to close the gaps at scale while preserving market share and brand promise. They chose Decklar.
The Challenge
To uphold its commitment to quality and compliance while retaining its prime position across emerging markets, the chocolatier needed better control over product quality that was compromised due to:
- Cold Chain Violations & Enroute Stoppages: Non-adherence to temperature thresholds — especially in high-temperature zones and during truck stoppages — risked spoilage, retailer rejections, and potential brand damage. This can be directly addressed by Automated Quality Release.
- Manual Monitoring & Audits: Quality teams at distribution centers manually opened shipments to inspect conditions, introducing delays, labor costs, and contamination risks.
- Unenforceable SLAs on Quality & Transit Times: The lack of granular, lane-level insights made it difficult to define and enforce SLAs with transporters. Inconsistent adherence to temperature controls and schedules led to variability in compliance, delays, and service quality.
What They Tried & Why It Didn't Work
- ERP & Planning Systems (e.g., Oracle, SAP): These systems held static records of cold chain compliance and transit times but couldn’t validate accuracy or trace root causes, making performance improvement reactive and unreliable.
- Carrier Aggregators: These platforms offered basic location data but lacked temperature visibility or actionable insights for SLA or compliance forecasting.
- Track & Trace Solutions: While some solutions combined location and temperature data, they failed to analyze lane- or node-level risk, predict quality release confidence, or establish chain-of-custody and root cause during violations.
Enter Decklar’s Real-Time Decision AI with Visibility
Rather than overhauling its cold chain infrastructure across 92 lanes, the chocolatier deployed Decklar’s AI-powered decision platform to drive scalable compliance.
- Each Full Truck Load (FTL) was tagged to monitor temperature, ambient light (container door activity), and location — providing trusted, real-time condition data.
- Compliance scores were generated for each lane based on parameters such as Mean Kinetic Temperature (MKT), Time Out of Refrigeration (TOR), and patterns.
- TOR frequency, excursion intensity, and alert responsiveness were used to benchmark and manage vendor performance.
- Temperature-prone zones were identified by lanes and time of day, enabling proactive alerts and transporter advisories.
- Receiving sites used live compliance data to bypass manual checks and accelerate quality release, while also supporting smarter inventory decisions through Dynamic Replenishment Planning.
Day 1: Operational Visibility Across Cold Chain
In the first quarter of implementation, the chocolatier:
- Gained Full Visibility: Into transporter behavior, cold chain compliance, and unscheduled stoppages.
- Enabled Proactive Monitoring: Replacing post-facto temperature logs with real-time exception alerts to the control tower.
Day 2: Decision AI at Scale
From the fourth month onward, Decklar’s decision intelligence accelerated the desired outcomes:
- Identified 10 Critical Lanes for Transportation Overhaul: Heatmaps and violation patterns pinpointed lanes requiring systemic intervention, enabling targeted infrastructure investments.
- Proactive Risk Anticipation Across the Remaining 82 Lanes: Decision AI flagged high-risk Points of Interest (POIs) using real-time and historical trends, offering minimal yet precise alerts to control tower teams.
- Automated Quality Release: Real-time shipment condition data enabled automatic GRN and QA clearance, cutting dock processing time and labor.
- Elevated Cold Chain Compliance from 57% to 90%+: Achieved through targeted interventions, stronger vendor accountability, and agile control tower execution without overhauling the broader infrastructure.
Why Decision AI with Visibility Was Needed Together
The combination of Decision AI and Visibility was essential because:
- Visibility Alone helped locate shipments but could not explain why temperature excursions were occurring, nor could it identify high-risk patterns across lanes and vendors.
- Decision AI Alone lacked the ground truth. It couldn’t anticipate spoilage risk or trigger corrective action without real-time environmental and geolocation data.
Together, they empowered the leading chocolatier to move from manual cold chain audits to automated, predictive compliance — boosting performance from 57% to over 90% without a full transport overhaul, and enabling intelligent, automated quality release decisions at the receiving dock door.
ROI Summary
Direct Benefits:
- Reduced Rejections & Spoilage Loss: $1M/year
- Quality Team Productivity Gains: $300K/year
Indirect Benefits:
- Improved Dock Turnaround Time
- Fewer Retailer Rejections
- Retained Market Share through improved brand promise and retailer confidence
Transportation Overhaul Cost Avoided:
- Estimated $400 saved per shipment across 20,000 shipments annually by enabling standard carriers to meet premium reefer standards, totaling $8M in annual savings
Total Annual ROI:
- $9.3M in direct annual savings, plus retained market share
Summary
By choosing Decklar over a costly transport infrastructure overhaul, the chocolatier made a strategic leap—saving $9.3M annually and retaining market share—by automating compliance, unlocking real-time decisions, and improving cold chain integrity by over 33 points (from 57% to 90%+). In an industry where product quality is inseparable from brand value, Decklar became a cornerstone of cost-effective transformation—preserving trust, preventing spoilage, and enabling smarter growth across every lane.
See how Decklar’s Decision AI can unlock the same results for your business — Book a Personalized Demo today.