South Korea’s major foodservice and catering providers Samsung Welstory Inc., Our Home Ltd., and CJ Freshway Corp. seeking a new revenue source amid saturation and stiff competition in the local foodservice market are accelerating their efforts to take a hold of the Vietnamese foodservice market burgeoning under increased income.

Samsung Welstory, foodservice unit under Samsung Group, on Wednesday announced that its new food products logistics center using cold chain system will start operation in the second half of this year. It broke ground on the logistic center with a total area of 5,805 square meters in Bac Ninh region, northeast of Vietnam’s capital Hanoi in February.

A cold chain system is a temperature-controlled supply solution that allows shipping and handling food products like meat, vegetables and fruits in fresh state. Samsung Welstory will be the first company in Vietnam to adopt the cold chain system-based logistics center, said a Samsung Welstory official.

Our Home that had restrained itself from overseas expansion since its advancement into China in 2010 also announced its forays into Vietnamese foodservice market. The company said Wednesday that it established a subsidiary in Haiphong, Vietnam’s third largest city located on northern coast of the country, in hopes that the Vietnamese subsidiary can help it to boost its overseas revenue to 150 billion won ($133 million) by 2020. The company plans to first launch catering services for foreign firms in Vietnam and later provide other food services.

CJ Freshway, foodservice unit of Korean food giant CJ Group that made inroads into the Vietnamese foodservice in 2012 for the first time among Korean players, has set Vietnam as its key overseas market for this year with an aim to rake in 70 billion won in revenue in the market, up from current 49 billion won.

The company has already beefed up its food logistics business by inking a contract with Vietnam’s largest food service company Golden Gate to handle and ship food products worth 10 billion won a year in November last year. It is also working together with Vietnam’s largest state-run retailer Saigon Trading Group on distributing fruits across the country. In addition, it plans to build a large-scale logistics center with a total area of 9,900 square meters in near Ho Chi Minh City.

By Baek Sang-kyung and Lee Hee-soo

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]