Ningbo

The city of Ningbo currently faces a number of challenges:

• Due to the explosive growth of online grocery shopping, the on demand hyper-local agricultural logistics has increased dramatically
• Improving Ningbo’s urban agricultural logistics is a crucial challenge and much-needed for both consumers and food producers, mainly farmers and fishermen, which are very fragmented
• There is not yet a good network of marketplaces, regulations, and logistics operators that ensures free flow of fresh food.
• High damage rate of the food.

Objectives of this pilot

For these reasons, Ningbo’s participation to the SPROUT project aims to:

• Investigate the cause of high damage rate and high logistic cost in Ningbo cold chain logistics.
• Help train local agricultural producers, wholesaler, and agricultural logistic providers the concepts, standards, and technologies of cold chain.
• Organize the distribution centers for local agriculture products, which then be transported to local consumers.
• Design the measurement of local logistic providers’ operating performance, including their cost of service, inventory turnover, service level, and energy usage.

These objectives would result in the following outputs to be mainstreamed into urban policy elements:

• Facilitate government to select a group of outstanding logistic providers to get financing and policy support in order to improve the operating efficiency and quality of cold chain system in Ningbo.
• Guide these logistic providers to provide logistic service for farmers, fishermen, as well as wholesalers.
• Investigate the causes of food damage and include policy to reduce the damage rate.