Cold chain infrastructure and challenges

Industry leaders discuss ways to deal with the challenges of maintaining the quality of fragile and agile goods throughout the cold chain transportation, while discussing the hurdles in temperature-controlled transportation in the F&B sector.

India’s cold chain industry is majorly driven by the agricultural and perishable long-haul distribution section. Hence, the dairy, frozen foods, exotic fruits and vegetables, and increasing pharmaceutical storage. Ever increasing demand for cold chain logistics in these sectors further raise concerns over sustainability, as this further added billions to the existing market for temperature-controlled solution and cold chain technologies in India. Stern norms for temperature-controlled and temperature monitoring requirements made large and key players stay during this segment. Moreover, the govt is additionally keen on bolstering the capacity and adding value to the cold storage sector, especially temperature-controlled requirements to fight the transport challenges. It’s also keen to deal with the farm-to-fork challenges within the cold chain storage and infrastructural challenges.

Present market trends for cold storage

The industry is growing day by day, and much of commodities are moving through cold chain across the states. Consumers are flocking to fresh foods. Fresh fruits, food and perishable commodities that were transported through traditional trucks are now moving through cold chain at a versatile and ambient temperature, further broadening their shelf-life; also, to keep the nutrient value intact.

Divyansh Rathore, National Head Supply Chain Operation at Future Supply Chain Solutions Limited., says,” It’s important for us to focus more on maintaining temperature integrity of products across the worth chain, investments in technology, temperature-controlled supply chain, quality compliance, sustainable activities and initiatives by industry.”

Eason Cheng, Marketing Manager Refrigeration APAC, CAREL says, “Remote management is one of the key trends in India. Although, the cold storage demands in India are intensifying meeting demands with the prevailing cold chain infrastructure and with limited skilled labours seems challenging. Remote management, like remote alarms, data logs, system analysis centralised monitoring systems with machine learning and system diagnostics are going to be the answer”, he adds.

“We are witnessing a serious shift within the industry, in terms of storage. Today, temperature controlled-logistics and cold storage is more about delivering an end-to-end cold chain facility instead of limiting itself only to storing the perishable and non-perishable essentials”, says Aditya Vazirani, CEO, Robinson Cold Chain Logistics.

According to Rahul Agarwal, Director, Kool-ex Integrated Cold Chain Services, “The demand for Cold Chain Logistics in India has been rising in the warehousing and trucking segment, primarily driven by the F&B sector, particularly the perishable consumables segment. Also, there is a strategic movement made by the pharmaceutical sector towards the cold chain, which affects the said sector. There’s also a move by strategic players to accumulate Cold Chain Assets.

Facilitating storage and transport requirement

Lack of expansion for multicommodity cold chain facilities can be attributed to a number of factors, including soaring real estate prices, a lack of knowledge about land use patterns and reliance on imported refrigeration technology.

“Investing more in cold chain infrastructure and ensuring a uniform allocation of available assets across the board is critical. There have been various state and central subsidy programmes that provide up to 35 percent assistance on capital expenditure or interest rate support, making the investment’s ROCE more viable,” Rathore notes.

These investments and subsidies may help to close the viability gap and address one of the major concerns. The industry’s focus will thus shift from single commodity storages to modern multicommodity facilities with the goal of consolidating and introducing better technology, thereby optimising the entire supply chain.

Agarwal sees a steady increase in demand for quality warehousing and storage in the pharmaceutical industry. “The pharmaceutical industry is extremely quality conscious, necessitating separate storage and warehousing for medical and pharmaceutical goods. Stringent government and industry standards emphasise quality storage and highly accurate temperature-controlled facilities for the medical essentials.

By introducing additional temperature-controlled transportation solutions for long-haul distribution of perishable products, we can acknowledge the vast natural resources and diversity of landscape, tropical and cold climate farm produce. The following are a few ideas to consider when developing a unified refrigerated container movement system –

• Shift all major transhipment and manufacturing to coastal areas
• Refrigerated container ships suitable to ply between all port of India along the west and east coast
• Refrigerated containers to be transhipped in-land using the natural in-land water ways, dredge and to our railway network for further inland delivery.
• Leveraging digital transformation, integration of emerging technologies such as IOT, to farm produce and allow then to track and control the efficiency of the supply chain execution on real-time basis unleashing the full potential of utilising India’s lead in software and big data. Real time visibility and traceability can improve additional lifecycle sales, long-term in stability and predictability.

Preserving perishable and fragile goods

Climate change is a worldwide concern; various studies show that the relationship between climate change and food focuses on pre-harvest factors. Refrigeration slows or stops the rate of change in food quality. Such variable circumstances place a greater emphasis on having quality assets for long-distance distribution, as well as accurate temperature.

Since shelf life of perishable products is small, it is important to have quality asset for long haul distribution, maintaining accurate temperature and humidity throughout transit. Agarwal here highlights that cost of distribution remains to be a challenge for perishable goods which are low in value. Also, quality of fragile goods is compromised during long distance transportation. “Because of the long distances, temperature control during transit becomes difficult, and we end up missing the quality. Second, real-time monitoring during long-distance transit becomes difficult because a minor deviation can damage the entire consignment.”

The key to these solutions is to maintain stable storage conditions in terms of temperature and humidity. Making the entire refrigeration system run smoothly in order to minimise the impact on stored products necessitates various levels of system control,” says Cheng. Electronic expansion valves, variable speed compressors and fans can help to keep the evaporating temperature stable in some cases with a variation of just +-0.1. Therefore, reducing the temperature and humidity impact on the products.

“The lack of efficient cold storage and temperature-controlled services drives them astray. In this case, technology and warehousing logistics play an important role in keeping them fresh. We must also recognise that these set-ups place a significant strain on energy and financial resources that could have been better utilised to generate a higher ROI,” Vazirani says.

Temperature-controlled services face the dual challenge of being both timebound and temperature sensitive. One of the major challenges that this industry faces, according to Rathore, is retaining employees. Skewed demand for temperature-controlled vehicles in the long-haul sector (loads concentrated in the west and north) also results in lower vehicle utilisation, because reverse haul movement becomes a challenge.

At the helm of several operational issues in the logistic market, vehicle tracking has made an entry to fully transform the cold chain logistic industry and bring in rapid growth in the coming years. In a bid to structure the transport industry, Government of India has made a substantial move by enforcing Automotive Industry Standard AIS-140, which has GPS/GSM trackers mandatory in all public service vehicles published by Automotive Research Association of India (ARAI).

Investments and growth prospects for cold chain

“Carel believes that reducing operating costs and minimising product waste through energy conservation can help users understand how implementing advanced technology is a wise investment in terms of both cost and food quality. To avoid skipping defrosts, we created a custom algorithm for the cold room controller. According to Cheng, high or low voltage protection can also help ensure system reliability.”

Noting this, Rathore says, “We are predominantly focused on the Pharmaceutical sector; however, opportunities for F&B lie in developing large scale cold storages that will reduce the cost per pallet and a better understanding of product seasonality. Thereby, enabling better space utilisation. ” Consumer awareness on quality and shelf life is also compelling companies to use better storage and transportation conditions, resulting an improvement in quality infrastructure.

Final Note

Any noticeable increase in ambient temperature from the climate change will have a substantial impact on the available and developing F&B cold chain. Increasing temperature will further deepen risk of food poisoning and wastage unless we enhance efficiency level in cold chain.