The lagging development of food cold chain brings huge waste.

"the ice cream bought is out of shape, the yogurt has water droplets on the outside, and the frozen dumplings are rotten as soon as they are boiled, all of which are actually the result of a broken cold chain." Recently, at the press conference of "2014 China International Agricultural products Cold chain Logistics Summit", Cui Zhongfu, vice president of China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, used these examples to illustrate the importance of cold chain logistics. "perishable food is required to be transported, handed over and stored in a cold chain environment all the time, so as to ensure food safety, freshness and nutrition, which is a very important link in food safety."

The study found that the key to control the safety of perishable food is to control the growth rate of microorganisms, and the key to control microorganisms is to control the temperature. When the temperature increases by 6 ℃, the growth rate of bacteria in food doubles and the shelf life is shortened by half.

However, at present, the development of food cold chain in China lags behind, and logistics industry representatives and experts at the meeting summed up three existing misunderstandings: backward logistics cold chain infrastructure, lack of supervision and poor implementation of cold chain standards, weak cold chain concept, weak food safety awareness. Because of these problems and misunderstandings, it has caused a huge waste.

"when it comes to food safety, more emphasis is placed on production and terminal retail and catering, but logistics safety has always been ignored." Cui Zhongfu pointed out in his speech that cold chain logistics is of great significance to ensure the quality of agricultural products and reduce the loss of agricultural products. He believes that at present, there is an unreasonable phenomenon in China's agricultural products market that "cheap vegetables hurt farmers, while expensive vegetables hurt people." one of the important reasons is that the pre-cooling facilities and cold chain transportation system of agricultural products are not perfect, resulting in a very short sales cycle of agricultural products. serious loss in the process of circulation.

In recent years, abnormal sales of agricultural products such as "beans you play", "garlic you ruthless" and "Jiang your army" have occurred from time to time. Cui Zhongfu analyzed the reasons and found that on the one hand, there are too many circulation links, which are caused by wild goose plucking and price increases layer by layer; on the other hand, it highlights the lack of cold chain logistics system. Due to the imperfect cold chain system, most agricultural products can not be sold in the wrong season, and the loss of agricultural products is serious, which to a certain extent causes the problem that the supply of agricultural products falls short of demand. Due to the backward cold chain infrastructure, most agricultural products are picked before maturity and transported to the place of consumption at room temperature, which is one of the reasons why consumers feel that the taste of agricultural products eaten in the place of origin and place of consumption is very different.

Cui Zhongfu pointed out that if the producing area has perfect pre-cooling and cold storage and processing facilities, it can effectively prolong the shelf cycle of products, expand the sales area of agricultural products, increase the added value of agricultural products, and achieve the effect of sales in the wrong season, and finally increase farmers' income. For example, after carrots are harvested, the quality will decline if they cannot be sold in a short period of time, and growers are often in a hurry to sell them without cold storage, and then the acquirers will push down the price at will. With cold storage and cold chain processing centers, the original 1400 yuan / ton carrots can be sold for 2000 yuan / ton or more after missing the peak season.

It is understood that due to the lagging development of China's cold chain transportation, the export of vegetables and fruits accounts for only 1% or 2% of the total output, and 80% of them are primary products, which lack competitiveness in the international market. Especially in recent years, with the developed countries constantly improving the access standards of imported agricultural products, the relevant quality, technology and green barriers have become the main obstacles restricting the brand building and export of agricultural products in our country. Speeding up the development of cold chain logistics of agricultural products will help to improve the quality of export agricultural products, break through trade barriers and enhance international competitiveness.

The data show that the cold chain logistics equipment in China lags behind at present. There are about 70, 000 refrigerated and insulated vehicles, accounting for only about 0.3% of freight vehicles. The total amount of cold storage is 26.73 million tons, and the per capita cold storage capacity is less than 20kg. In addition, the current structure of cold storage in China is not reasonable and its function is out of balance. There are many obvious phenomena, such as more fruits and vegetables cold storage, less fresh-keeping storage, more urban cold storage, less rural cold storage, more operating cold storage, less processing cold storage, more civil cold storage, less assembled cold storage, more eastern cold storage, less central and western cold storage and so on.

According to statistics, the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing has released several figures: the circulation rate of cold chain of fruits and vegetables in China is only about 10%, while the loss rate of fruits and vegetables is as high as 30%. If the loss rate of fruits and vegetables is reduced from the current 30% to 5%, then more than 100 billion yuan can be saved every year, almost 100 million mu of arable land.