Fresh food e-commerce faces a big test on Double 11, cold chain is key
The "Double 11" big test has made all fresh food e-commerce players go all out, preparing to make a fortune. Suning.com, Womai.com, Tmall and others have all launched large-scale fresh food special promotions, so the fresh food cold chain will therefore face a "big test."
Fresh food e-commerce, which emerged around 2005, has become a hot trend with the recent entry of large logistics and e-commerce players such as Taobao, JD.com and SF Express. The arrival of "Double 11" has made all fresh food e-commerce players go all out, preparing to make a fortune. Suning.com, Womai.com, Tmall and others have all launched large-scale fresh food special promotions. However, since last year, the fresh food e-commerce market has continued to cool, investment enthusiasm has faded, and the fresh food category is no longer a red-hot "blue ocean." How can fresh food e-commerce stay "fresh"? Industry insiders should think about this more.
From the current situation, China's fresh food e-commerce is struggling. High costs plus low average order value keep the gross profit margin of fresh food e-commerce below 30%. Data shows that among more than 4,000 fresh food e-commerce enterprises nationwide, 95% face losses or even huge losses. In the long run, China's fresh food e-commerce market has enormous room for growth. According to a report by research institution Nielsen, the scale of China's fresh food e-commerce market was about 50 billion yuan in 2015, and is expected to exceed 150 billion yuan in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of about 50%. This set of data also indicates that the trend toward fresh food e-commerce is irreversible.
How can fresh food e-commerce stay "fresh"? The key is to make up for the biggest shortcoming - the cold chain. According to statistics, compared with the 3%-5% spoilage rate of fresh products in some developed countries abroad, China's fresh product spoilage rate is as high as 20%-30%. Most of this loss occurs during circulation. The reasons, apart from unscientific packaging materials, include the lack of scientific management in the transportation process and broken cold chain links, which are also among the main causes.
Because fresh products have a relatively short shelf life, this determines that they have relatively high requirements for warehousing, distribution and supply chain response speed. Different fresh product categories have different requirements for logistics refrigeration temperature, temperature and so on. However, the construction of fresh food cold chain logistics cannot be completed overnight. It not only requires a large amount of capital investment, but also requires professionalism. It is understood that at present, the cold chain home delivery facilities of some fresh food e-commerce companies are still relatively backward, still using the "foam box plus ice pack" model. At the same time, the preservation of fresh product categories not only requires ensuring that the "cold chain is not broken," but also requires professionals to adopt different pretreatment methods according to different categories of fresh products before logistics delivery. By contrast, some developed countries attach great importance to the "first mile" construction of agricultural product cold chain logistics, and to keeping fresh products in a scientific low-temperature environment during the early stages of picking, pre-cooling, grading, processing and packaging at the place of origin, so as to ensure the quality of fresh products and reduce losses.
Forecasts show that of the 250 billion yuan in online transactions of agricultural products in China in 2016, fresh products alone accounted for 100 billion yuan, nearly double the 54.4 billion yuan in 2015. With the rapid increase in the market space of the fresh category, competition among fresh food e-commerce players has also arrived. Only by ensuring that the cold chain is not broken and paying attention to pretreatment can consumers taste the freshness of fresh products and can companies also keep their own development "fresh."