To win in fresh food competition, logistics capability is key
"Internet fresh food" is no longer fresh, but how fresh food e-commerce can achieve optimal profitability and how to seize market share has always been an industry talking point. During the 618 mid-year shopping festival, fresh food e-commerce spared no effort in fighting hard, but the results showed that the winners of this battle won on cold-chain logistics.
During the 618 e-commerce mid-year shopping festival, major e-commerce platforms elevated fresh food to a key competitive category. In addition to Tmall, JD.com and others focusing their efforts on fresh food, vertical fresh food e-commerce players were also unwilling to fall behind. Yiguo Fresh, Fruit Day, Benlai Life and others all brought consumers promotions and discounts of varying intensity.
Among them, Yiguo Fresh's performance was particularly outstanding, with single-day sales on 6.18 exceeding the same period last year by more than 10 times, making it the big winner in fresh food in this 618 battle and continuing its good result as the fresh food sales champion of Tmall's "Double 11" in 2015. Behind these impressive results, Anxiansuda, the cold-chain delivery company under Yiguo Fresh, played an indispensable role and became the most important decisive weapon.
Yiguo Fresh: The behind-the-scenes hero of the sales champion - Anxiansuda
During this 618 mid-year shopping festival, the fresh products consumers bought on Yiguo Fresh, its APP, the Tmall Supermarket fresh food channel and the Tmall Yiguo flagship store were all delivered by Anxiansuda. A reporter learned randomly in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other places that the fresh products bought by consumers at the above sites could all be received by the next day at the latest. There was neither the problem of delivery timeliness being delayed during the major promotion nor a single case of fresh products being delivered without cold chain. Anxiansuda's cold-chain delivery strength is so strong that it is also the most leading among domestic online fresh food service providers.
During this 618 period, the reporter also bought products on several fresh food platforms, and each company's logistics speed was noteworthy. In this 618 major promotion, compared with the situation of some platforms delaying shipment during the event, Yiguo's omnichannel delivery timeliness could be guaranteed at normal levels, and most cities could achieve next-day delivery.
Mou Yidong, Director of Research and Development at Anxiansuda, introduced: "During the peak period of the event, Anxiansuda shouldered the heavy responsibility of handling more than 100,000 orders per day on average. Every link, from warehousing, processing, order assembly and packaging to delivery, operated at high speed, ensuring that every order could reach customers quickly, safely and freshly."
Founded in 2015, Anxiansuda is a one-stop fresh food logistics cold-chain delivery company under Yiguo Fresh, providing fresh food merchants with integrated services such as cold storage warehousing, cold-chain trunk lines, cold-chain short-haul transport, safety quality inspection, product packaging, sorting and processing, cold-chain home delivery and store sales.
Anxiansuda, which officially debuted during "Double 11" in 2015, has not been established for long, but relying on the rapid growth of Tmall Fresh and Yiguo orders, as well as deep cooperation with Cainiao Logistics, Anxiansuda is growing rapidly. At present, its national order processing capacity has reached 100,000 orders/day, its self-delivery capacity has reached 30,000 orders/day, and in the delivery process it has achieved storage of goods at three temperature layers: room-temperature preservation, refrigerated preservation and freezing. At present in China, apart from Anxiansuda, there is no second professional integrated fresh food cold-chain service company.
Fruit Day: Self-built plus third-party logistics, working both approaches
Fruit Day, which uses fruit as its selling point, adopts a supply chain management approach that combines self-built logistics with third-party logistics. Wang Wei of Fruit Day once told the media that Fruit Day spent 3-4 years doing infrastructure construction, mainly focusing on cold-chain logistics and warehousing systems. After receiving investment from JD.com, Fruit Day also relied on JD.com's capabilities to cover a nationwide logistics system. For the transportation of imported fruit, the journey from the place of origin to customs is completed by a third party. After that, the link of distribution to warehouses in various places is carried out by Fruit Day's own logistics team or a third party.
Delivery timeliness has always been an important consideration for consumers of fresh fruit. It is understood that Fruit Day has built distribution centers of about 50,000 sq m in total in four cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu.
Benlai Life: Full cold-chain delivery of more than 8 hours
Benlai Life has established frozen and room-temperature warehousing bases in all three places of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Its room-temperature delivery service covers more than 200 cities, and its warehouse area has exceeded 80,000 sq m. At the same time, Benlai Life has practiced and innovated in mixed-temperature delivery, using dedicated delivery personnel and equipping professional-standard refrigerated warehouses (0-4°C) and freezer warehouses (-18°C) to store according to each product's unique preservation needs, providing full cold-chain delivery of more than 8 hours to ensure that products reach consumers' hands in the most suitable environment.
At the Central Economic Work Conference at the end of last year, the requirements explicitly stated, "We must reduce logistics costs and advance reform of the circulation system." Insufficient cold-chain facilities and excessively high costs are one of the weak points of China's logistics system, and some media have also called it the "Mount Everest" of the logistics industry, which to a certain extent has hindered the rapid development of the fresh food e-commerce industry.