Fresh E-commerce: How to Defend Cold Chain Safety

Today, you bought a fresh lobster online and delivered it home, but tomorrow, will you continue to buy a chicken online?

In 2012, fresh e-commerce companies boomed in the market, known as "the last piece of O2O cake in life so far". Over the past three years, the number of fresh e-commerce has reached more than 4000, and bigwigs such as Alibaba, JD.com and Amazon have also joined the battlefield of fresh e-commerce. However, this "last piece of cake" has not been "gnawed off".

Fresh e-commerce companies also have a clear understanding of this. "everyone thinks that fresh food is high viscosity and high growth. For example, if you have meat today and want to eat fish tomorrow, it seems that there is a great demand. In fact, fresh food accounts for the total amount of e-commerce transactions is very low, there is a very large market space to be excavated. " Lian Zhijun, president of Shun Feng optimal selection, said.

Pain point: safety of fresh products

At present, the brand recognition and aggregation of fresh products in the market are not high. Lian Zhijun believes that this requires enterprises to achieve food safety solutions in the whole supply chain from the field to the table.

In order to meet the needs of consumers in circulation, sales and service, Lian Zhijun said that the strategy of Shun Feng's selection and customer selection is to open up online and offline all-channel sales and carry out direct brand integration.

For SF, which started with logistics, it is by no means easy to get through both online and offline. Shunfeng was launched on May 31, 2012, and opened on May 18, 2013, but it was not until May 5 this year that SF was integrated, and the online SF Select platform and nearly 3000 offline stores were opened.

Lian Zhijun realized that fresh food needs strong integration. "We hope to integrate the resources needed by various projects in the group for commercial circulation, and realize the choice of warehousing, distribution channels, sales and other aspects." In order to enhance consumers' awareness and brand recognition of fresh e-commerce, Shunfeng selected the layout of commodity publicity and display, and carried out more interaction for fresh in some cities and communities, and put forward a lot of new service items for community fresh.

Shunfeng has made more attempts on how to approach the needs of users in the field of circulation, while for the upstream enterprises of fresh e-commerce, how to ensure the safety of fresh food from the source is the "pain point" that they pay more attention to.

Chen Xingyi, vice president of New Hope Liuhe Co., Ltd. and president of Hope Finance, stressed that it is necessary to promote the upgrading of the entire industry from the perspective of customer management, and comprehensively build the entire industrial chain from the perspective of customers and consumers as terminal demands.

The solution he gives is: Internet + industrial chain + service.

Chen Xingyi believes that it is necessary to check at the source of fresh supply. To this end, they even provide Internet finance help programs for small farmers and farmers, using mobile phones to train their breeding skills. "We will tell him how much feed a chicken needs to eat and how much water to drink on the first day. In addition, the technology of the Internet of things is used to monitor the temperature. Once the temperature is higher or lower than a certain temperature, chickens may get sick, freeze to death or starve to death. Sensors transmit data from each day to help with breeding, epidemic prevention, collection, early warning and decision-making. " Chen Xingyi stressed, "We must use the means of Internet + 's Internet of things, especially the mobile Internet."

Over the past two years, many provinces and cities have adopted the means of adding traceability to the packaging of fresh products, as long as a scan of the QR code, the production process can be fully displayed on the screen.

Fresh e-commerce companies want to protect the safety from the field to the table. Chen Xingyi points out that it is all the more necessary to promote the application of QR codes in fresh products. The information covered should even be refined to include processing plants, production dates, farm locations, feed, seedlings, testing standards, testing time, and so on.

Cold chain logistics is the key

SF optimal selection, JingDong Fresh, No.1 fresh, Meow Xiansheng, SUNING and Amazon fresh have all cross-border cold chain logistics, which is also one of the key points that distinguish fresh e-commerce from other traditional enterprises "Internet +".

Interface News has reported that China's rotten fruits and vegetables in logistics can meet the basic nutritional needs of nearly 200 million people every year, and the main culprit for this waste is the backwardness of cold chain logistics.

Lian Zhijun realized this problem: "when there is a problem with the quality of any commodity, it is bound to bring a great crisis to the overall brand reputation of the enterprise, and it should be done more and more strictly." For this reason, Shunfeng has optimized to increase the monitoring of fresh storage and logistics, including the periodic inspection of the warehouse and the temperature control of the logistics link, "from every conceivable link to check".

Chen Xingyi said that first of all, the link of "freezing" must meet the standard, such as quick-freezing for more than two hours, and the low temperature below minus 20 degrees Celsius can be transferred to minus 4 degrees Celsius for storage. In the quick-freezing link, the input cost of keeping minus 20 degrees Celsius for an hour is actually very high, and many enterprises will cut corners in these links. What was supposed to be frozen for four hours was reduced to two hours. Under normal circumstances, after 4 hours of freezing and then distribution, it is not a big problem after 10 hours of transportation, but if it is reduced to 2 hours of freezing, there will be safety problems of fresh food.

In the cold chain, the cross-contamination of fresh food is also a problem to be solved.

It is reported that in order to reduce cross-contamination between different fresh packaging, many enterprises will split their positions and open orders, which will increase operating costs. "however, this is a necessary step, such as the separation of food and non-food stocks to reduce pollution." Lian Zhijun said.

If consumers order four or five items and later find that there are two or three orders, that is, fresh e-commerce merchants open orders according to different temperature levels, and may arrive one after another in order to meet different delivery times. Lian Zhijun admitted: "this kind of order splitting results in a poor user experience, but there is a security guarantee."

Multiple modes will coexist.

It is well known that the cost of fresh e-commerce in building a cold chain is high, but how high is the cost? Tuotuo Industries, a fresh e-commerce company, has said that the cost of each delivery order for its own cold chain is about 50 yuan. According to its average daily order number and distribution cost within the sixth Ring Road in Beijing, Shunfeng calculates that the cold chain logistics and distribution cost of each order is about 47 yuan, which does not include warehousing, IT, customer service system costs.

Chen Xingyi also said: "We are all in large quantities, not small quantities for consumers." Large quantities of meat containers should not be filled with vegetables or cooked food. This link is relatively easy to do. Each time it is 10 or 20 tons, one freezer and one truck. If it is for consumers, a person may buy a few jin, so fresh e-commerce will be under pressure, and fresh e-commerce also has strict requirements on investment. "

In this case, not all fresh e-commerce companies build their own cold chains and logistics, and some have to rely on third parties. And some fresh e-commerce companies are only responsible for the "last kilometer" of fresh food. For example, the connection merchant exceeds the existing cold chain inventory and takes Shang Chao as the center to complete the final route distribution within an hour, half an hour and a kilometer.

According to multi-point co-founder Han Xin, the young company, founded four months ago, squeezed into the fresh e-commerce market like this: "Shangchao has done a good job in many aspects of the entire industrial chain, and we will take advantage of its existing advantages." at the same time, we hope to strengthen what Shangchao is not good at. "

Which model can compete in the fresh e-commerce market?

Han Xin believes that the fact that so many models are trying to enter the field shows that everyone will expand to other chains from the perspective of different resource advantages. "this model will not be a dominant company in the end, and several different models will survive because the market is too big. For us, brotherly enterprises like Shunfeng are not competitors, but we all work together to make the education market bigger and better. " He stressed.