The Scope and Influence of Cold Chain Logistics Have Evolved!

As the global food industry is focusing on quality, health, & integrity, the demand for cold chain logistics is gradually increasing worldwide. The basic components of a cold chain include storage, packaging, monitoring, transporting, custom clearance, product handling, and delivery. It is indeed an expensive system as it ensures the safe transportation of goods with special packaging and refrigerated storage infrastructure. ?It is mainly a temperature-controlled supply chain that is used to transfer temperature-sensitive goods such as pharmaceutical drugs, biological products, and commodities of the food industry.

Moreover, cold supply chain logistics has a major contribution to the economy and workforce. It is a key enabler of the growth of trade and commerce in an economy. It facilitates serving goods & services to the customer as and when they are needed.?At the same time, it plays an important role in decreasing the wastage of biodegradable products, thereby offering rewarding prices to crop growers.

According to a report published by Allied Market Research, the?global cold chain logistics market?size is anticipated to register 782.27 billion with a significant CAGR from 2021 to 2030. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to manifest the highest growth rate, attributed to rapid growth in the retail sector & pharmaceutical sector in highly populated countries like China & India. For instance, a planned infrastructure investment of around 100 lakh crore rupees has been done in India, which has sequentially boosted the growth of the food processing sector. This, in turn, led to increasing the demand for cold chain logistics to a great extent.

However, the outbreak of the COVID- 19 pandemic adversely hampered the supply chain management of almost every industry across the globe. This is due to the implementation of the global lockdown which gave way to several restrictions on industrial trade. To cope with such a tough situation, the food and pharmaceutical sector arranged better storage facilities for the products to increase their shelf life. Also, the fact that millennials started to purchase more of their grocery products online during the pandemic has driven the demand for cold chain logistics in more than one way.

Furthermore, the government of several economies along with private food processing and distribution companies are constantly looking for numerous strategies. One of them is the incorporation of warehouses with refrigeration facilities to overcome challenges like lack of standardization, lack of awareness for managing the temperature-sensitive devices by the stakeholders, improper storage handling, high operational cost, poor transport facilities, and lack of sufficient core infrastructure such as water supply, gas supply, power supply, roads, drainage, etc. They are aiming to expand cold chain logistics and automation systems to keep pace with demand and position for future growth. With this drift on board, the global cold chain logistics market is expected to gather immense growth prospects in the near future.