China Accelerates Origin Market Construction as Food Cold-Chain Demand Hits 200 Million Tonnes

Construction of agricultural origin markets is advancing, with a series of cold-chain storage projects at production sites being accelerated across multiple regions to improve the first mile of agricultural distribution. Under the plan, 50 agricultural origin market clusters and more than 1,500 origin cold-chain collection and distribution centers are to be built by 2030, along with the cultivation of a number of leading agricultural distribution enterprises.

The highland summer vegetable preservation and storage facility project in Huangcheng town, Sunan Yugur autonomous county, Gansu province, recently began construction. Huangcheng has highland cool-climate conditions, and local highland summer vegetable output has risen year by year in recent years, but the lack of professional preservation and storage facilities has meant that vegetables can only be simply stacked after harvest, resulting in significant losses, insufficient off-season supply and marked price fluctuations. Once completed, the project can be used for pre-cooling, constant-temperature preservation and storage for staggered sales. In addition, agricultural cold-chain logistics projects in Ding'an county, Hainan province, and Panshan county, Liaoning province, are also being accelerated or put into operation.

Production sites are the source and starting point of fresh agricultural products from farm to table, and insufficient pre-cooling, grading and storage capacity at production sites remains a problem. In major agricultural production areas, especially in the central and western regions, facilities such as field-side pre-cooling and storage and preservation are still incomplete. The operating mechanisms of some wholesale markets remain imperfect, social services such as third-party warehousing, joint distribution and shared cold storage are insufficient, and some origin facilities sit idle seasonally. The problem of insufficient post-harvest commercialization capacity also needs improvement.

Since 2026, both the 15th Five-Year Plan for Accelerating Agricultural and Rural Modernization and the 15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the National Agricultural Origin Market System have addressed origin cold-chain logistics. Demand for cold-chain logistics has grown steadily and the market scale has continued to expand. In the first half of 2026, total food cold-chain logistics demand reached 200 million tonnes, up 4.7% year on year. From 2020 to 2025, China's total food cold-chain logistics demand grew from 265 million tonnes to 381 million tonnes, an increase of 43.8%.

On the equipment demand side, in the first half of 2026, newly added cold-storage capacity totaled 4.909 million cubic meters, while capital investment in cold-storage projects reached RMB 24.19 billion, up 8.4% year on year. On the transport side, sales of new energy refrigerated vehicles reached 20,285 units in the first half of 2026, up 92.3% year on year. Logistics companies such as SF Express and JD. com are extending their cold-chain networks to production sites.

ZTO Cold Chain is building a front-end shared sub-warehouse model, setting up shared cold storage in production areas so that specialty agricultural products complete pre-cooling, grading and packaging at the origin before connecting to the trunk-line network. The model is intended to strengthen cold-chain links as agricultural products leave villages and enter the market. The recently released 15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the National Agricultural Origin Market System proposes advancing the digital and intelligent development of the agricultural market system, accelerating the application of digital and intelligent technologies and equipment, deploying intelligent production lines and intelligent warehousing and distribution facilities as needed, and promoting artificial intelligence plus agricultural distribution. The plan also proposes giving play to the role of large agricultural wholesale markets, chain leader enterprises and leading agricultural industrialization enterprises, and exploring new models such as digital centralized procurement and distribution and unified warehousing and distribution.