Good quality control in fresh food e-commerce is inseparable from a good cold chain

In recent years, companies rushing into the fresh food e-commerce sector have emerged one after another, and can be roughly divided into three categories: e-commerce platforms mainly represented by Tmall, Yihaodian, and JD.com; vertical e-commerce players such as Tuotuo Gongshe, Benlai Life, and SF Best; and traditional retail enterprises such as Walmart, RT-Mart, and Yonghui Superstores. In the fresh food sector, known as "the last blue ocean of e-commerce," companies of all kinds have been stepping in to seize a foothold in the "fresh food" market.

Fresh food e-commerce battles it out over "cold chain" and "quality control"

Judging by the links required by a fresh food e-commerce company, fresh products go through multiple stages from early cultivation to delivery into consumers' hands, and face many problems such as a low degree of standardization, easy spoilage, difficulty of storage, high delivery requirements, and great difficulty in quality control. Among these, cold chain and quality control capabilities have become the core competitiveness of fresh food e-commerce.

With the improvement of people's living standards and changes in consumption concepts, consumers have ever higher quality requirements for fresh products; green and organic products are in wide demand, and e-commerce platforms, benefiting from their geographical advantages, have become a fast channel for consumers to obtain mid-to-high-end fresh products.

At present, there are two ways for fresh food e-commerce to obtain products at the source. One is to cooperate with third-party suppliers: for example, Yihaodian adopts direct sourcing from orchards and farms for its supply, while JD.com sells directly supplied origin goods through its platform. The other is "one-stop" service, that is, a self-operated model covering a whole series of links including early cultivation, picking, packaging, delivery, and sales, with Tuotuo Gongshe as a typical example; it mainly grows organic vegetables on its own and raises organic poultry and livestock; it has also established its own distribution center and cold chain logistics system, giving it stricter and more standardized control over quality at the source. It is understood that Tuotuo Gongshe currently has its own farm in Beijing and 7 jointly operated farms including one in Shanghai.

In cold chain logistics and delivery, some fresh food companies already provide customers with services such as cold transport warehousing, cold transport trunk lines, cold transport home delivery, fresh food sales, and supply chain finance, locking in the entire fresh food delivery market. As a vertical fresh food e-commerce player, Tuotuo Gongshe, in solving "last mile" delivery, uses fully self-operated cold chain delivery within Beijing's 6th Ring Road, while fresh food business outside the Beijing area is handled in cooperation with third-party logistics, with full cold chain delivery throughout. At present, Tuotuo Gongshe takes Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai as its core, and has already launched delivery services for fresh food category products in 32 cities including Tianjin, Liaoning, Hebei, Henan, and Shanxi.

Standardization of delivery services

As daily necessities, fresh products have large market demand and have become a battleground for major enterprises. According to data released by the Ministry of Commerce, in 2013 China's total e-commerce transaction volume exceeded 10 trillion yuan, of which the fresh food e-commerce transaction scale reached 13 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 221%, but the proportion accounted for by fresh products was only 0.7%, still less than 1%.

Quality is the initial driving point for consumers to buy products. Given the characteristics of fresh products being perishable and hard to preserve, fresh products have higher logistics requirements, and self-built logistics offers high controllability over delivery time nodes and damage rates. Moreover, with the support of a proprietary logistics chain, e-commerce players can collect data at the end and then analyze existing data. The regional nature of fresh products means some products can only be supplied from specific places of origin, and as market scale expands, setting up sub-warehouses in other locations has also become an important measure. At present, JD.com, Tuotuo Gongshe, and others all use self-built logistics systems. According to Tuotuo Gongshe, Tuotuo Gongshe will select key cities to establish sub-warehouses within the year.

While doing a good job on products, fresh food e-commerce has also entered an era of competition in back-end services. In the later stage of courier delivery services, standardization and professionalization can improve the user experience. Tuotuo Gongshe trains couriers on common knowledge about identifying and preserving agricultural products, fruits, and vegetables, and has policies such as "inspect the goods before signing for receipt." In addition, measures such as cold chain logistics and building warehouses to complete last mile delivery by fresh food e-commerce have alleviated product shelf life problems and further enhanced the consumer shopping experience.