Freshippo, Alibaba Group's digital intelligence-powered new retail company, has officially launched its supply chain centre in Shanghai. With a total area of nearly one million square feet, the centre has the largest area of any Freshippo supply chain centre, boasting the highest technological capabilities, and has received significant investment.
In July 2023, Freshippo officially launched its supply chain centre in Shanghai.
The centre, located in the Pudong New Area of Shanghai, took three years to build. It is a comprehensive supply centre integrating the processing of agricultural products, research and development into ready-to-eat food, the cold storage of semi-finished food, a centralised kitchen, and cold chain logistics distribution.
As the fresh produce supply hub for Freshippo in Shanghai, the centre not only supports over a hundred Freshippo Supermarkets, Freshippo X Clubs and other retail store formats in Shanghai but also covers the whole east China region, including areas such as Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Hefei.
"The centre announcement marked upgrading Freshippo's new retail supply chain. Data will drive it to promote the full automation of Freshippo's warehouse operations and management. At the same time, it will use Freshippo's special central kitchens to improve the efficiency of our supply chain greatly, and will reduce operating costs and fully process various agricultural products to add business value," said Hao Jingbin, director of Freshippo supply chain centre.
"This is Freshippo's first wholly automated park, which includes an automated cold chain fresh processing centre and a series of logistics automation facilities systems. It also leverages technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things and blockchain to achieve full automation and digitisation of the entire supply chain, which helps to improve supply chain efficiency and reduce operational costs."
Freshippo has deployed automated equipment such as AGV in its supply chain centre.
The centre leverages automated equipment such as automated guided vehicles (AGV), robotic arms, and cross-belt sorters. AGVs use QR codes and inertial navigation technologies, allowing them to be deployed on the cloud server during product sorting.
Tang Lei, director of Freshippo Shanghai Centralized Kitchen, said that another significant feature of the supply chain centre was its centralised kitchen, where fresh ingredients were processed into prepared dishes, complementing the complete supply chain process of Freshippo's private brand prepared dishes products from research and development to production and transportation.
Every step of the supply chain can be traced, from raw materials to producing fresh food and transportation to stores.
"This ensures high standards of food safety and dramatically improves the iteration speed and promotion efficiency of self-developed food to help Freshippo develop prepared dishes so that consumers can quickly enjoy delicious fresh food of Freshippo's brand in the busy urban life," said Lei.
Since its establishment, Freshippo has developed its fresh produce logistics supply chain and built a strong logistics network, putting its seven supply chain centres in northwest, southwest, central, and east China into production one after another. Freshippo is devoted to building a large-scale fresh multi-temperature layer logistics system to serve consumers better nationwide.
