Food cold chain development lags behind, food waste is enormous

“The ice cream you bought is deformed, the yogurt has water droplets on the surface, and frozen dumplings fall apart as soon as they are boiled. These are actually all the result of a broken cold chain.” Recently, at the press conference for the “2014 China International Agricultural Products Cold Chain Logistics Summit&rdquo, Cui Zhongfu, vice president of the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, used these examples to explain the importance of cold chain logistics, “Perishable food requires the entire process of transportation, handover, and storage to always be in a cold chain environment. Only in this way can the safety, freshness, and nutritional value of food be guaranteed. This is a very important part of food safety.”

Research has found that the key to controlling the safety of perishable food is controlling the growth rate of microorganisms, and the key to controlling microorganisms is controlling temperature. For every 6℃ increase in temperature, the growth rate of bacteria in food doubles, and the shelf life is shortened by half.

⟦NL> However, China's food cold chain development currently lags behind. Logistics industry representatives and experts at the meeting summarized three existing misunderstandings: China's cold chain logistics infrastructure and equipment are outdated, cold chain standards lack supervision and corporate enforcement is weak, and cold chain concepts are weak and food safety awareness is not strong. These problems and misunderstandings have caused enormous waste.

“When it comes to food safety, the emphasis now is more on the production stage as well as 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 for ensuring the quality of agricultural products and reducing agricultural product losses. He believes that China's agricultural product market currently has the unreasonable phenomenon of “cheap vegetables hurt farmers, expensive vegetables hurt consumers,” and one important reason is that pre-cooling facilities at agricultural product origins and the cold chain transportation system are incomplete, resulting in a very short sales cycle for agricultural products and serious losses during circulation.

In recent years, abnormal agricultural product sales phenomena such as “Dou Ni Wan” (sob with soybeans), “Suan Ni Hen” (ferociously expensive garlic), and “Jiang Ni Jun” (ginger general) have occurred from time to time. Cui Zhongfu analyzed the reasons and found that on the one hand, there are too many circulation links, with each link taking a cut and adding markup layer by layer; on the other hand, it highlights the lack of a cold chain logistics system. Because the cold chain system is incomplete, most agricultural products cannot be sold out of season, and agricultural product losses are serious, which to a certain extent has caused the problem of agricultural products being “in short supply.” Due to outdated cold chain infrastructure, most agricultural products are picked before they mature and transported at room temperature to consumption areas. This is also one of the reasons why consumers feel that the taste of agricultural products eaten at the place of origin and at the place of consumption is completely different.

Cui Zhongfu proposed that if the place of origin has complete pre-cooling, cold storage, and processing facilities, it can effectively extend the product shelf cycle, expand the sales area of agricultural products, increase the added value of agricultural products, and achieve the effect of out-of-season sales, ultimately increasing farmers' income. For example, after carrots are harvested, their quality will decline if they cannot be sold within a short period. Growers without cold storage often rush to sell, and at that time buyers will arbitrarily the price. But with cold storage and a cold chain processing center, carrots originally priced at 1400 yuan/ton can be sold for 2000 yuan/ton or even higher after the peak purchasing season has passed.

It is understood that because China's cold chain transportation development lags behind, the export volume of vegetables and fruits accounts for only 1%-2% of total output, and 80% of that is primary products, lacking competitiveness in the international market. In particular, as developed countries have continuously raised access standards for imported agricultural products in recent years, related quality, technical, and green barriers have become major obstacles restricting the building of China's agricultural product brands and exports. Accelerating the development of agricultural product cold chain logistics will help improve the quality of exported agricultural products, break through trade barriers, and enhance international competitiveness.

Data shows that China's current cold chain logistics equipment lags behind. There are about 70,000 refrigerated and insulated vehicles, accounting for only about 0.3% of freight vehicles. Total cold storage capacity is 26.73 million tons, and per capita cold storage capacity is less than 20 kg. In addition, China's current cold storage structure is not entirely reasonable, and its functions are unbalanced. Phenomena such as more meat cold storage and fewer fruit and vegetable cold storage, more freezer storage and fewer fresh-keeping storage, more urban cold storage and fewer rural cold storage, more commercial cold storage and fewer processing cold storage, more civil-construction cold storage and fewer prefabricated cold storage, and more cold storage in the east and fewer in the central and western regions are obvious.

The China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing has published several figures based on statistics: China's cold chain circulation rate for fruits and vegetables is only about 10%, while the loss rate for fruits and vegetables is as high as 30%. If the loss rate for fruits and vegetables is reduced from the current 30% to 5%, then more than 100 billion yuan can be saved each year, which is almost equivalent to saving 100 million mu of cultivated land.