[photopress:china_fruit.jpg,full,alignright]Newswire Today reports that optimizing the cold supply chain is now crucial to cold storage and distribution suppliers.
Fruits and vegetables suffers from a high decay rate during transportation and storage and transportation does not as yet meet actual requirements. Currently there are 30,000 cold stores with a total capacity of 6 million tons, and air-conditioned stores of 2 million tons. This is substantially less than is needed.
Vehicles carrying fruits as well as vegetables are generally freight carts or trucks without refrigeration or normal vans with ice.The damage during transportation is estimated at a high rate of up to 15 to 30 percent.
Cold chain logistics hold out lucrative business opportunities for logistics service providers in China. The top domestic cold-chain 3PL in Shanghai is Speed Fresh Logistics which was set up in 2004 by parent Bright Diary and Food, the largest diary products company in Shanghai.
But much of the rest of China’s cold-chain infrastructure is still fragmented, under-funded, and scrambling to keep up with soaring demand. With several upcoming events, including the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, the need to move quickly is growing.