“Food should be pampered and handled the way a guest is treated in a hotel,” says Yaseen Balwa, the Co-founder of Supreme Fresh, emphasizing on the necessity of cold storage facilities being an integral part of the logistics chain.
This opinion by Mr. Balwa evidently points towards the fact that companies that provide cold storage solutions play an integral role across various sectors. Pertaining to this importance, Supreme Fresh, a part of Supreme Cold Chain, was founded to provide top-notch storage conditions and solutions for agricultural produce.
With a proven expertise and experience of 17+ years, Supreme Fresh is one of the first integrated solutions providers in the cold storage space offering refrigerated storage for temperature-sensitive consumables to retain product characteristics, active ingredients, freshness, and nutritive values for longer durations.
The company’s mission is to offer quality and technologically advanced cold storage solutions for hygienic storage of fresh produce with an effective and automated delivery. And its vision is to be the market leader in cold storage solution with innovation in service, quality, and delivery.
Supreme Fresh is primarily a storage solutions provider for import and export of fresh fruits, vegetables, dates, spices, dry fruits, etc. The company also provides complete solutions of grading, sorting, packing at its dedicated packhouse at the desired temperature and humidity before they are shipped to the desired destination abroad.
Supreme Fresh’s facilities are practically the best in industry, being, both dust free and temperature controlled, utilizing the latest in technology and offering solutions such as vertical automatic conveyors, pallet goods lift, ethylene scrubbers, dehumidifiers, and a professional team to execute a safe and efficient solution to every client’s supply chain needs.Additionally, the company’s warehouse infrastructure also comprises of multi-temperature chambers to meet the most stringent requirements for handling a broad range of temperature-controlled products at same time.
We asked Mr. Balwa his opinion on the basic criteria or checkpoints that must be fulfilled and followed to operate a cold storage facility, to which he commented, “Any cold storage facility should be easily accessible by road and with large open space for easy manoeuvring of containers. The facility should also have large temperature controlled holding areas and adequate height in cold rooms for better cold air circulation through the stored products. The facility should be efficiently planned for easy storage and retrieval of goods. The installation should be carried out with utmost care so that the air losses are minimum, thus minimizing loss of Energy.”
Talking about the challenges that the company faced, Mr. Balwa says, “The challenges faced by cold storage sector are non-continuous, viz., high energy operating cost and unavailability of labour and no or less application of supply chain management. Talking about the challenges during COVID-19 pandemic, not just the cold storage space, it has affected every industrial sector in the country with drastic reduction in import and export of perishable items due to non-availability of shipping lines, reefer containers, transport trucks to ply from farm to cold storage facility. Our facility was operating at 30% of its capacity. Huge quantity of agriculture produce got wasted due to lack of transportation during the peak lockdown time where in the produce could not reach the facility on time.”
Supreme Fresh has always adopted technology at every stage which gives it a competitive edge over others in the market. The company aims at providing prompt service through faster loading, unloading, and delivery of goods which is achieved by three vertical material conveyor and three pallet goods lift. This reduces the dependency of labour force and reduces the time by 50%. Additionally, installation of Ethylene scrubber machines ensures an increase in freshness and shelf life of sensitive imported products like Kiwi, Apples, Apricot, Grapes etc. Dehumidifier in anterooms ensures the area remains dry even in the wettest of monsoon for safe maneuvering of the goods.
To scale its operations and expertise in the coming future, Supreme Fresh Plans on entering the cold logistic space with reefer trucks and also building cold storage networks in the North, East and South zones of the country so that perishables are stored at right environmental parameters and remain fresh and non-toxic during their transportation and distribution until the point of sale.
