eGrocery

The E-Grocery sector is growing rapidly, which poses new challenges for companies in the food retail sector, especially when it comes to last-mile delivery. One of the biggest hurdles is maintaining the cold chain to ensure a constant temperature throughout the transportation process.

At the same time, companies need to optimize delivery costs and ensure product quality as customer expectations for product variety and freshness increase. In order to remain competitive, costefficient and quality-oriented solutions are essential.

va-Q-tec offers a perfect answer to these challenges with its innovative, passive packaging solutions. Our technologies enable a constant temperature without additional energy source. This eliminates the need for dry ice and refrigerated vehicles, which leads to a significant reduction in electricity and operating costs. The cold chain remains intact without any gaps, while the quality of the food is maintained throughout the entire transportation process. This results in fewer complaints and greater customer satisfaction.

Overall, these solutions offer a sustainable, cost-efficient and high-quality delivery that optimally meets both, the customer demands and economic requirements.

In order to evaluate the economic efficiency of different passive cooler solutions, the following calculation example compares the costs of the conventional solution with dry ice, the conventional solution with two ice packs and the va-Q-box solutions for the fresh and frozen ranges.

The evaluation is based on 5,000 transport units per year in the frozen area (“Frozen”) and 20,000 transport units in the fresh area (“Fresh”), spread over 300 delivery days per year. The required thermal performance of the passive systems used is between 8 and 12 hours. In addition, it is ensured that pre-cooling of the cooling elements or batteries can be realized within 24 hours before delivery. The economic analysis period for investments and useful life is five years.

To ensure comparability of the solutions examined, a simplification was made: All passive systems considered have identical external and internal dimensions as well as the same total weight. This neutralizes volume and weight-related influences on logistics and handling.

This analysis does not take into account other economic and infrastructural factors such as capital costs (interest), conversion or changeover costs, employee training and structural measures for specific refrigeration technologies such as dry ice. The additional qualitative benefits of technological high-tech solutions, such as the reduction in complaints, are also left out of the equation – although experience from individual customers indicates up to 40% fewer complaints in the frozen and fresh food sector. Potential investments for the expansion or modernization of cold stores are also not included in the analysis. These clearly defined framework conditions enable a factually reliable and practical comparison of the pure product performance and operating costs of passive refrigeration solutions.