Perspective on India's Cold-chain

India has developed an enviable capacity in the cold storage format across the country. As per the 2014 report of IARW (International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses), India had 131 million cubic metres in cold storage capacity, overtaking USA which has 115 million cubic metres. China has the third largest capacity globally with about 76 million cubic metres in cold storage space. The worldwide capacity in refrigerated warehouses was reported as 552 million cubic metres in this report by IARW. Between May 2014 and July of 2015, India added another 200 units or a little more than one million tons to its cold storage space. Though about 5% of the facilities may have become obsolete over the years, India can now lay claim to having created almost 7200 cold stores equivalent to about 33 million tons in holding size, most of these over the past decade.

Meeting the Global Food Crisis

There is a Food Crisis in our world - can it truly be met by sowing more crops, increasing farm level yields, to store that food in banks? These are among some topics I mooted when speaking on the subject at UK's House of Lords.

There ought to be no doubt that there exists a global food crisis! Across the world, 795 million people suffer from hunger - Hunger is defined as a painful sensation from want of food! This pain afflicts 525 million people in Asia, 215 million in Africa, 37 million in Latin America & Caribbean and others. Women form 60% of these numbers and a child dies every 10 seconds from hunger related inflictions.

What is notable, is that this food crisis is most prevalent in producing regions, areas that have a food surplus, not food shortage. The question is why? Why is it, the producing areas face more hunger?

Shelf life is not storage life

Holding period in a warehouse is opportunity lost.

Keeping food secure for long is not always a worthwhile achievement... making sure it arrives for gainful end-use is the real target. Aim to make sure you reach the consumer - get on the shelf!

Segregation is good… sometimes

Cold chain operators are usually counselled that they must segregate goods in the cold-chain.

The need to segregate stems from the fact that fresh farm produce is frequently incompatible with one another, and is good practice to mitigate risk of damage & food loss.

Segregation is important in the cold-chain

Cold-chain is not only about cooling alone but must look at various compatibility aspects between different species of the goods involved. This is in particular the case when handling fresh fruits and vegetables. Unlike aseptically sealed foods, the packaging of fresh produce has to allow access to the surrounding air and therefore makes it susceptible to tainting, moisture loss and biological triggers.

Cold-chain Storage Types

We frequently see confusion in use of the terms that describe or relate to different types of cold storage spaces. This article defines the basic categories of environment-controlled storage systems used in food supply chain.

Size and Capacity - are distinctly different, even if correlated

Cold-chain is about Speed!

Frequently cold-supply-chain strategists are asked to help develop models for a laudable vision, one that envisions a revenue multiplier for farmers-producers. This Vision is typically presented alongside tactical options, those that focus on enabling small farmers to offset their sales by storing their weekly or seasonal produce, thus avoiding peak season price drops. This is also expected to avoid distress sales due to low shelf life of the perishable produce.

Ergo the cold-store, which is viewed as a buffer space that can extend the trade opportunity, conceivably offering safe, risk free storage and defer the sale to a more favourable future date. This tactic lends itself to the core premise that the buying markets will pay a higher value at a later date, when supply patterns are low.