Preserve and protect, Extend and connect - apply sensibly

Essentially, the cold-chain is tasked with two underlying functions - to “Preserve and Protect” and to “Extend and Connect”. Let us explore these two distinctions and by understanding them, the approach to cold-chain development may merit certain changes.

First, let us clearly differentiate the type of products that benefit from the cold-chain.

In further simplifying, we can consider two extremes from a choice of product types... ice cream and fresh mangoes. The first symbolises the frozen (< -18 °C) segment and the other is from the mild chill (10-20 °C) segment. In the case of ice cream, the cold-chain functions to preserve the product, and in the case of mangoes the cold-chain serves to extend its prevailing, but short saleable life.

APO Cold-chain Workshop

APO's first Workshop on Cold-chain (2014)

Talking Points at Asian Productivity Organisation Workshop in New Delhi - co-hosted by National Productivity Council and NCCD.

- As you are aware, all raw food is sourced at harvest – be it livestock, fish, dairy, agriculture or horticulture. In India, a largely vegetarian country, horticulture is a major source of high value food.

- Horticultural produce (which is primarily perishable in nature), intrinsically requires the integration of activities during its post-harvest life cycle. Any breach in the required set of activities, results in loss of the produce – physically or in its value realisation.

- These losses cannot merely be attributed to a short life cycle due to the lack of temperature controlled logistics. A major cause of food loss also stems from flawed handling - poor hygiene practices, packaging not suitable to the distances the produce has to travel, bottlenecks and delays due to multilayered transactions.

Perpetuating fallacies - more on market research

Yet another spate of research reports were sent to me, some having quoted the National Centre for Cold-chain Development (NCCD); almost all referring to out-dated data and sadly, confidently extrapolating that into futuristic scenarios.


I cannot help but point out some of the errors and omissions, else yet another set of documents, poorly understood and researched would be bandied about as gospel (distorting whatever they aim to propound)!

Perpetuating misinformation or inexperienced interpretations is the biggest threat to India's cold-chain development. Worse… when they are given guise of authoritative alignment. More so, because these studies are frequently lapped up by the gullible who buy this largely to make plans and strategise their businesses.

These theorised documents would be agreeable and pass muster if they were but reports or outputs from study groups... if only they did not attempt to lend their secondary collation undue legitimacy aimed at decision makers.

Market for Fruits in India

India is viewed as a steady state consumption market, including for fruit produce…and it has lived up to this perception! Over the last 10 years, imports into India of apples, kiwis, pears, grape have seen phenomenal growth; not merely doubled or quadrupled, but more than 10 fold growth has been witnessed.

On the domestic front, Indian farms repeatedly break production records but one does not see a likewise increase in trade volumes from these domestic source points. What prevents our own produce from spanning the sub-continent and emulate the growth our imports have witnessed?

Is it that our consumers have a penchant for imported fruit, a specific flavor, a specific brand?

Fish for food!

Fish farms or aquaculture farming is catching on in a big way in India. This is because of rising health awareness and demand for fish meat, and increased logistics bottlenecks along traditional fish sources and lower catches from those regions.

So, new catch is being developed in hinterland fish ponds, the idea being that a long term source of alternate food and earnings can be developed in our farm lands.

The whole idea of modern fish farming is to enhance productivity, thereby the supply, and therefore commercial returns to our farming community.

Cold Chain scenario in India?

What is the Cold Chain and what is its importance for the Agriculture sector? What is the overall scenario of Cold Chain in India? What are the challenges before us, where we stand in comparison to other developed countries? What kind of technological & infrastructural and knowledge up gradation logistic companies need to do to meet the demand of goods in the future? What are the challenges do you see in front of logistic companies to reach the rural areas and how can it be tackled? Wal-Mart has parted itself from Bharti very recently, how will it affect the India’s retail and supply chain industry and its infrastructure? What is NCCD doing and its future goal?

Above are a series of questions thrown my end, with some quick responses in revert.

Cold-chain is a series of interlinked chain of activities that link perishable goods from source point to destination. Inherently cold-chain must involve a market linkage and a product life cycle matrix.