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On the security of cold chain logistics

time:2021-01-28 pv:2378

In recent years, with the rise of new economic models such as fresh e-commerce and vegetables and fruits, cold chain logistics has ushered in a golden opportunity period.


On July 7, the National Development and Reform Commission officially published a list of the first batch of 17 backbone cold-chain logistics bases.

Cold chain logistics has become an important infrastructure, how to build in the future?

This is a topic that needs further discussion.


Multi-angle in-depth analysis of the cold chain logistics industry, can not ignore the cold chain logistics security discussion, which is one of the pain points of cold chain logistics, is also an important indicator of cold chain logistics in 2020.


First, the pain point of cold chain logistics, security can not be ignored


China's cold chain logistics started late and developed rapidly, and it has a huge market space and development prospect. However, there are also many problems and difficulties that need to be solved by the whole industry. The safety protection of the whole process of cold chain logistics is an important issue.


With the strong rise of e-commerce, fresh products have further penetrated into the Chinese consumer market, and the circulation rate of major cold chain products such as fruits and vegetables, meat and aquatic products in China has been greatly improved.

Demand surge, let the cold chain logistics become the key link of food circulation.


As an important part of modern logistics industry, cold chain logistics industry will continue to develop rapidly in the next few years.

On the one hand, cold chain logistics is a key supporting link in the production and marketing chain of agricultural products in China, and its development has drawn much attention and attention from the central government.

On the other hand, with the change of people's consumption concept and consumption mode, the improvement of freshness of food materials will promote the upgrading of cold chain supply chain. The domestic cold chain industry is expected to maintain 20% growth in the next three years, and the industrial scale will reach 485 billion yuan in 2020.


At the same time of demand growth, pain points are also exposed. The number of complaints from users of fresh e-commerce platforms is increasing year-on-year, and the safety of cold chain products needs to be solved urgently.


Cold chain logistics is related to product safety and freshness, product service quality and reputation.

The development of cold chain logistics and the problems it is facing have to attract the attention of the industry. Frequent events cause wide attention to the safety of cold chain logistics products.

Accelerating the construction of cold chain logistics security system and ensuring the safety of people's "vegetable basket" has become an important subject under the normalization of cold chain logistics.


How to achieve security in cold chain logistics?


In 2019, the construction of urban and rural cold chain logistics facilities has been written into the meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. With the introduction of cold-chain logistics policies in many regions and fields, the standardization system of cold chain logistics will gradually improve and supervision will gradually strengthen.

Development to standardization and standardization direction, this has guaranteed effect to security.


As consumers have higher and higher requirements for food safety, the quality awareness of the cold chain market will continue to increase, and the cold chain logistics will develop toward the direction of intelligence, multi-function, standardization and serialization, and the safety level is expected to improve.


In the whole process of cold chain logistics, the transportation process is relatively safe, but problems are likely to occur at each important node.

Therefore, in the whole process of cold chain logistics, it is more important to minimize unnecessary contact with personnel, keep staff fixed as far as possible and pay attention to daily protection, which is even more important than the constant temperature of refrigeration equipment at present.


In addition, the parties also put forward specific proposals, such as strengthening the security protection of the whole process of cold chain logistics, promoting intensive management, and reducing the contact of personnel in each link;

Strengthen fresh e-commerce platform collaboration, jointly create a more perfect cold chain logistics system;

For the whole supply chain link (from the origin to the place of sale) to realize data collection and monitoring, establish a unified monitoring standard and monitoring platform, achieve the transparency of the whole supply chain, implement the positioning of the status of goods......


In a word, the improvement of living standards and the change of consumption mode have promoted the accelerated development of cold chain logistics. Therefore, under the background of cold chain logistics becoming normal, all parties should take multiple measures to protect people's "safety on their tongue".


A modern cold-chain logistics system with "whole chain, network, strict standards, traceability, new model and high efficiency" should be established as soon as possible in line with the national conditions, so as to meet the needs of residents' consumption upgrading, promote the increase of farmers' income, guarantee consumption safety and ensure the "safety of the people's taste".


Second, to ensure the safety of the two categories of cold chain products is an important subject for people's livelihood


At present, the application of China's cold chain logistics industry is mainly focused on food and pharmaceutical products, and the e-commerce market of these two industries has reached a large scale.

In 2020, the transaction scale of fresh e-commerce in China will reach 263.84 billion yuan, and the B2C market scale of medical e-commerce will reach 70.85 billion yuan.

With the continuous growth of China's per capita income, residents have higher and higher requirements on the quality of life and the freshness of products, which promotes the rapid development of food and agricultural cold chain logistics.


Cold chain logistics is like a bridge, connecting the supply of agricultural products and consumer demand, making it possible for fresh consumption, which is difficult to cross regional problems in the past.

Cold chain logistics can effectively organize fresh suppliers, businesses and consumers, improve logistics efficiency and experience through direct delivery of agricultural products, and help more specialty products in the field to enter thousands of households with the upgrading of circulation.


As we all know, the food and agricultural cold chain logistics industry chain mainly involves freezing and refrigeration processing;

Cold storage;

Transportation and distribution;

Terminal sales and other links.

Cold chain logistics at low temperature can not only limit the freshness, nutrition, color and taste of food, but also have an obvious inhibiting effect on the growth of most bacteria.


Therefore, in the process of goods circulation, cold chain logistics can ensure that goods are not damaged by bacteria as much as possible, prevent food and agricultural products from deteriorating, and provide guarantee for the safety of goods.


The improvement of cold chain logistics makes new retail enterprises expected to simplify the intermediate links, rely on information technology to directly force the upstream to improve quality and service, and even achieve customized production, so as to promote fresh consumption market upgrading and agricultural industry transformation.

At the same time, it can meet consumers' demand for fresh food, strengthen food safety and help consumption upgrade.


However, at present, the development of cold chain logistics of food and agricultural products is still faced with many problems, including the shortage of dedicated logistics lines for different products.

Different products need to control different temperatures, and the lack of relevant industry standards in the industry further hinders the coordination of logistics operation and makes it difficult for enterprises to reduce costs.

In order to save costs, some drivers will turn off the refrigerators during transportation and turn them on when they are about to reach their destination.

For example, in the handling, loading process, due to personnel operation is not in place, also often lead to high temperature......


Fruit and vegetable transportation is a complex perishable food, testing the driver's transportation knowledge.

As the types of goods are very rich, not only the required temperature and humidity are different, but also the quality of many products is easily affected by temperature fluctuations.

In addition, fruits and vegetables will still breathe and generate heat after picking, so it is more difficult to test the heat preservation and refrigeration effect of refrigerated vehicles.


With the outbreak of "New Crown Epidemics", residents have gradually increased their attention to medicine and health, which has promoted the further development of pharmaceutical cold chain logistics in China.


Pharmaceutical cold-chain logistics products include drugs, devices, blood, vaccines, biological products and other cellular tissues.

The drug terminal mainly includes hospitals at all levels nationwide, drug wholesale enterprises, drug retail enterprises or directly to patients.


Biologics are mainly used in the medical field, and therefore are highly demanding in cold chain transportation.

Not only the performance of the transport vehicles, but also the transport of such goods need to meet the new GSP certification of the Food and Drug Administration, the placement of goods, temperature detection equipment, management process and so on have quite strict standards.

Whether vaccines, biological products, biological drugs or diagnostic reagents, all need cold chain transportation, and there are extremely strict requirements for temperature control, which puts forward higher requirements for cold chain equipment and practitioners.

At present, the pharmaceutical product industry chain is still not perfect, and the cold chain of China's major pharmaceutical enterprises and logistics enterprises has not formed a national radiation network.


Whether it is for fresh or pharmaceutical market, cold chain logistics has a strong support and promoting role.

The growth of these two markets, in turn, promotes the development of the cold chain logistics industry, but security is an important link.


Third, the pattern of small and medium-sized dispersion affects the safety, and the system construction needs to be accelerated


The market scale of China's cold chain logistics industry is expanding year by year, and cold chain logistics enterprises are developing rapidly, but they are still scattered and small on the whole.

According to the statistics of China Internet of Things Cold Chain Committee, the top 100 cold chain enterprises account for less than 5% of the market share.

In 2019, the market size of China's cold chain logistics industry was about 339.1 billion yuan, up 17.6% year on year.

However, compared with Europe, the United States, Japan and other countries, China's cold chain circulation rate is still at a low level, and the industry concentration is low.


The geographical distribution of cold chain logistics enterprises is uneven, and they are mainly concentrated in economically developed areas.

Third party cold chain logistics system is not transparent, the market is mixed, fresh electricity suppliers in the choice of third party cold chain service providers have fear.


Cold chain logistics generally includes pre-cooling, packaging, warehousing, transportation, distribution and other links. The main infrastructure includes cold storage, refrigerated cars, insulated boxes, refrigerated display cabinets in supermarkets, etc. The lack of cold chain facilities in any of these links will reduce product quality.

At present, China's cold chain logistics industry is facing the problem of "broken chain", unable to guarantee the whole temperature.

The reason why the "broken chain" problem is prominent is that China's cold chain logistics is still relatively scattered, and the market concentration is low.


The cold chain industry is dominated by "small and medium-sized scattered" enterprises. Some enterprises tend to have disorderly competition and chaotic price. Problems such as inadequate monitoring and non-implementation of standards in cold chain transportation also occur from time to time.


The cold chain logistics industry is an industry with large initial investment, high operating cost, long investment return cycle and low rate of return, which leads to the insufficient investment willingness and investment intensity of many private enterprises.

This is the main reason why it is difficult for large enterprises to appear in the big market of cold chain logistics and the professional division of labor of cold chain logistics has not yet formed.


High cost and low income lead to 90% of China's cold chain enterprises are regional, most of them only transport part of the products in a specific field, no scale effect is formed, and the industry concentration is low.

In terms of the pharmaceutical cold chain, due to the high cost of transportation and network operation, no enterprise has yet formed a national pharmaceutical cold chain network.


In the past decade, the number of enterprise registrations related to cold chain logistics has been increasing year by year, and it has been developing rapidly since 2017. In 2019, the number of enterprise registrations has exceeded 10,000.

Equally noticeable with the rapid development is the serious system construction problem in cold chain logistics.


At present, China has not formed a cold chain logistics supervision system covering the whole chain, so it is impossible to carry out comprehensive and effective supervision on the use of temperature control, refrigeration and temperature control recording equipment in each link.

This leads to the standardization of the enterprise to implement the standard cost is high, do not implement the standard of the enterprise can seize the market, the industry has a certain "bad money to drive out the good money" phenomenon.


China's cold chain infrastructure structural contradictions are more prominent.

Take cold storage as an example. From the perspective of geographical distribution, cold storage is scarce in cities with large demand for cold storage, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

And some provinces and cities there is blind excessive construction of cold storage, resulting in cold storage supply exceeds demand.

From the cold storage function, at present, there are more storage cold storage, less circulation cold storage, more cold storage, less cold storage, more cold storage at the selling place, less cold storage at the producing place, many cold storage function positioning lag behind the market demand.


At present, China's cold chain logistics is still in the primary stage, and there is still a big gap between the level of cold chain logistics and developed logistics.

According to the characteristics and demands of its own agriculture, Europe carries out the construction of the cold chain logistics system for agricultural products and has advanced technologies in the cold chain logistics for medicine. All these are worth learning from.


Food is the most important thing for people. Cold chain logistics is related to food safety and medical safety of people's health, which cannot be ignored. Ensuring the safety of cold chain logistics products has become an important livelihood topic under the normal epidemic prevention and control.

As a public welfare industry and an industry for people's livelihood, cold chain logistics should be developed first in the investment of the central budget, support the construction of a number of backbone cold chain logistics bases, and completely break the dilemma of "small and medium-sized scattered" and yet to form a professional division of labor. It is of great significance.


Source: Logistics Products Network