JD.com ramps up efforts in the fresh food e-commerce market, increasing its investment in fresh food business layout
Our reporter Zhu Wei reports: As food consumption upgrading accelerates, the fresh food market is becoming a battleground that e-commerce giants must contest. Recently, JD Fresh launched the "Seeking Freshness Across the World" series of events and signed strategic agreements with multiple overseas brands, aiming to provide domestic consumers with safe, healthy, one-stop fresh ingredients by exploring major high-quality fresh food origins around the world.
A research report by Analysys Think Tank shows that in recent years the domestic fresh food market has been expanding year by year, and the scale of the fresh food e-commerce market is expected to exceed 140 billion yuan. Source control will be one of the development trends of fresh food e-commerce in the future.
Wang Xiaosong, vice president of JD Group and president of the Fresh Food Business Unit of JD Mall, said that starting from consumer demand, JD Fresh has specially set up a domestic and international "buyer" team of about 200 people to conduct strict evaluations of admitted merchants, strictly screening them through means such as pre-verification of qualifications, research on supplier credit records, on-site inspections and multi-dimensional reviews, so as to ensure the quality and safety of fresh food from the source.
Zhang Yu, a member of JD Fresh's white shrimp procurement team, feels this deeply: "The process of seeking 'shrimp' around the world requires great care, and one must always hold oneself to the standpoint of consumers." In order to find high-quality white shrimp, Zhang Yu and his team flew to the United States, Indonesia, New Zealand, France and many other major shrimp-producing countries to conduct on-site research.
For a long time, warehousing and cold-chain logistics have been pain points for fresh food e-commerce. "Because the requirements for temperature and storage are very high, no matter how high-quality the fresh food is, it cannot do without the 'last kilometer' of delivery, which directly determines consumers' online shopping experience." Mo Daiqing, a senior researcher at the China E-commerce Research Center, said that self-built logistics has its own supporting warehouses and a self-contained system of standards, which can effectively solve the delivery problems of fresh food, but because costs are too high, few e-commerce companies have yet become involved.
According to reports, in order to open up the "last kilometer" of fresh food delivery, JD.com will invest 10 billion yuan within 3 years to build a cold-chain logistics network, establish origin collaborative warehouses and cross-border bonded fresh food self-operated warehouses, so as to compress the supply chain of cross-border fresh food products to the greatest extent and reduce intermediate links.
The origin collaborative warehouse is based on JD.com's standardized operation capabilities and information system processing capabilities, merging partners' warehousing functions with JD.com's warehousing functions, and then entering JD.com's entire sorting and distribution system for operation. Simply put, it means building JD.com's warehouses directly near the orchards, sorting centers or warehouses of large partners, facilitating transportation and processing as soon as products come off the line, thereby providing consumers with a faster and safer shopping experience.
Mo Daiqing believes that for fresh food e-commerce to break through in competition, product standardization is an unavoidable direction. In this regard, Wang Xiaosong said in an interview with our reporter that JD.com's self-operated model makes it easier to achieve standardization than the platform model. At present, standardization has already been achieved for 2 categories of products, fruits and vegetables. In the future, JD Fresh will also use standardized process management to control quality in all links such as standardized planting, scientific sorting and quality storage, continuously providing consumers with high-quality and safe products.