China builds cold chain logistics for consumer demand

Modernization in China will revolutionize the country’s consumerism.

The purchasing power of both urban and rural consumers for fresh and packaged agriculture products combined with the rise of on-line food deliveries is creating opportunities to modernize China’s end-to-end cold chain capacities. Rural harvests of peanuts, Wangmang peaches, organic kiwis and apples are some of the items consumers purchase in stores, from mobile software applications (apps) and websites while cold storage logistics is striving to meet their demand. Lower developed inland cities of Xiangyang, near Wuhan city, in Hubei province and Xi’an, home to the ancient terra-cotta soldiers, in Shaanxi province are two cities gradually building cold chain infrastructures to 21st century international standards.

Most consumers have access to affordable smart phones in China where a simple lunch of noodle soup at a local restaurant are purchased without cash changing hands by the simple waving of the WeChat pay phone app to the restaurant or store’s two-dimensional bar code. This ease of doing business is transferring to perishables and for ordering groceries on-line with great potential for cold chain logistics. There are 350 million millennials in China. In 2018, the total amount of on-line sales was $1.306 trillion (9.01 trillion yuan), an increase of 23.9% over 2017, according to China Daily.