Internet Plus helps farm-to-supermarket sourcing become more efficient

Liaoning is an important off-season fruit-producing region in China. For a long time, many fruit buyers from Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, have purchased their goods in Liaoning. In the past, it often took several days for Chifeng residents to get fruit from Liaoning. Recently, Wanqiang Commercial Transport Group shortened this process to within 24 hours. How did they do it?

Wanqiang Commercial Transport Group has two large supermarkets in Chifeng, as well as a number of community chain fresh-food convenience stores. Yin Fugui, general manager of the group's supermarket chain company, said that to cut costs and increase efficiency, they are now strongly promoting farm-to-supermarket sourcing, but because they purchase many categories, the production areas are widely distributed, and information is asymmetric, costs remain relatively high and the process is also rather cumbersome.

⟦NL> By chance, Yin Fugui learned about and downloaded the agricultural product procurement app “Yimutian”. On this app, supply information for fresh fruits and agricultural products from all over the country is readily available.

On the morning of March 25, Yin Fugui led a team to Yimutian's Shenyang store and submitted a bulk procurement request. Soon, the other party used its internet big-data backend to present a price list of fruits from various suppliers in Shenyang.

After quickly obtaining samples and inspecting the goods, Yin Fugui decided to purchase more than 10 kinds of fresh fruits on the spot, with 980,000 yuan in payment transacted on Yimutian's online platform. Because the purchase volume was relatively large, by 3 p.m., Wanqiang Commercial Transport Group had finally completed coordination with multiple suppliers. At 4:30 p.m., the vehicle departed from Shenyang. Six hours later, fresh fruits from Shenyang were placed on the shelves of the Chifeng supermarket.

Dang Guoying, a researcher at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that at present, agricultural products sold through farm-to-supermarket sourcing in China account for only about 15%, while in the United States it is as high as 80%. China's farm-to-supermarket sourcing has developed relatively slowly. One important reason is that under the traditional model, farm-to-supermarket sourcing faces many difficulties: due to asymmetric information, supermarkets have relatively high requirements for agricultural product quality, and suitable production areas are not easy to find; farmers' professional cooperatives are still in the initial stage of development, and their supply capacity often cannot meet the needs of supermarkets and shopping malls. “Relying on internet big data, the information bottleneck between producers and sellers is broken, and these difficulties can be readily solved. Wanqiang Commercial Transport Group's supermarket completed a million-yuan-scale bulk purchase in 24 hours, providing a very good example of more effective farm-to-supermarket sourcing in the ‘Internet Plus’ era.”