Cold Supply Chain Essay

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Cold Supply Chain – Indian Perspective
The cold chain involves storage and transportation of products which are temperature sensitive and are likely to go waste if not protected through thermal and refrigerated packaging methods. The transportation could be done through trucks, railcars, refrigerated cargo ships or through air cargo. The cold chain is a critical factor to extend the shelf life, marketing period, avoiding over capacity and maintaining quality of these perishable goods. Development of this industry in a country like India where agriculture is prevalent becomes a directive to reduce wastages and in turn providing remunerative prices to the growers. Cold supply chain also is also the backbone in the pharmaceutical industry …show more content…

Even with such pressing requirements, warehousing has seen very little investment in the country. Currently, spending in organized warehousing in India is only 9% of the total logistics spending (its 25% in the US). Logistics costs account for around 6-10% of total retail cost which is higher than the global average of 4-5%. Improvements in the supply chain and logistics can bridge this gap. An integrated supply chain (including the cold supply chain) can save more than ₨ 300 Billion for the country. This along with saving perishable horticulture produce should be an incentive to develop logistics infrastructure in a country like India plagued with inflation and …show more content…

India is one of the largest producers of horticulture crops in the world. However, India is way behind countries like China and the US in yield per hectare and stores only two percent of its produce in temperature controlled condition. This is though the fact that the country has adequate abilities to store ten percent of its yield. Of the total produce, 30-40% is wasted before consumption due to inadequacies in the supply chain. Cold storage in India has been largely adopted for long-term storage of potatoes, onions and high value crops like apples, grapes and flowers. 75 percent of the cold storage capacity is used to store potatoes, while only 23 percent fall in the multi-product category. Cold storages for meat, fish and dairy items and for other items such as chilies and other spices account for only 1 percent of total cold storage capacity. These cold storages are also usually smaller in

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