Purpose: Main attention regarding vaccine supply chain has been drawn on strategic decision level with a limited concentration on tactical and operational levels. Temperature maintenance along the vaccine supply chain remains to be one of the challenging logistical problems. The purpose of this paper is to understand the characteristics, challenges and opportunities of the vaccine cold chain today and how emerging technologies (e.g. vaccine vial monitoring, thermostable vaccines and new packaging systems) affect its development and implementations that can be done before the availability of new technologies. Design/methodology/approach: Literature review is done on the topic of vaccine cold chain, with the key search word of vaccine cold chain. Supporting resources include the official websites of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers. Findings: The gap between the existing literature and the potential requirements; Trend to future research on vaccine cold chain. Research limitations/implications: Contents about strategic decision level of vaccine supply chain are excluded. Practical implications: Pending for empirical studies; Does not consider cost-effectiveness and environmental impacts on the vaccine supply chain. Originality/value: The number of vaccines has expanded in the past years due to improved immunization programs across the world, and the vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic have the nature of high demand and pressuring time requirement, posing a need for improvement on the existing cold chain. Many existing pieces of literature on this topic are case-specific or scenario-based, and more general operation management insights are important as well, which can be beneficial to the decision-makers in the vaccine supply chain
