“ Summer is coming, and community group buying faces a major test. Cold chain capability has become an unavoidable hurdle for all community group buying platforms. External market competition intensifies, while internal costs are high, corporate management is chaotic, and lack of cold chain leads to shrinking order volumes. Under internal and external troubles, it is expected that some platforms will see order declines. At the beginning of the year, Duoduo Maicai, Meituan Youxuan, and Chengxin Youxuan set high performance targets. But currently, these original goals are difficult to achieve. The difficulties of leading players also become opportunities for latecomers. On the evening of August 3, Alibaba Group announced its Q1 FY2022 financial results. In the report, Alibaba MMC also officially released its first report card after launch: from April to June this year, GMV grew about 200% quarter-over-quarter, and the construction area of regional distribution centers (RDC) increased by 260% quarter-over-quarter. The differences between new and old platforms seem to indicate a shift in the competitive landscape of the community group buying industry. ” The community group buying industry is facing a summer cold chain test. According to 36Kr, the entire community group buying industry hit a growth bottleneck in Q2. Before the Spring Festival, leading platforms often exceeded 200 million yuan in daily GMV, but by May, daily sales generally fell to 150 million yuan. In addition to tighter regulation, the weak cold chain capability in summer leading to fulfillment issues is also an important reason. As early as last winter, some pointed out that this summer would be a watershed for community group buying in fresh produce. Entering the scorching August, the impact of cold chain differences is becoming more evident. Why emphasize cold chain so much? Cold chain capability not only affects current order volume and GMV but also relates to each player's future growth potential—with good infrastructure, it's easier to expand beyond fresh produce into other categories, and any business becomes more manageable. Most importantly, cold chain reflects the determination of internet companies. Community group buying has attracted nationwide attention, and a major controversy is: how much of the massive human and financial resources invested by these internet giants will truly be deposited into socially useful infrastructure? One year after entering the market, each player is about to hand in their first report card. However, from an external perspective, cold chain capability is difficult to quantify. Without access to internal data, ice cream becomes an excellent observation window. Ice cream is almost the hardest category in community group buying. Under the next-day delivery model, an ice cream stick takes 24 hours from the merchant's warehouse to the user's hands. These 24 hours must be temperature-controlled throughout—once the temperature deviates, it melts, and unlike frozen goods, there is no remedy after deformation. Therefore, to know each player's cold chain strength, a small ice cream stick holds the answer. Alibaba MMC unexpectedly becomes a summer dark horse "We supply twice as much to Hema Market as to other platforms." Tao Tao is a large ice cream supplier in Xi'an. He started working with community group buying channels in June this year. Currently, he supplies over 1,500 cases (boxes) daily to Hema Market under Alibaba MMC, while Duoduo Maicai and Meituan Youxuan fluctuate around 700 cases, and Jingxi and other platforms are below 200 cases. It is particularly noteworthy that when Alibaba's community e-commerce business group (MMC) was established in March this year, it covered only four provinces, while leading players covered 30 provinces—a huge disparity. But the latest entrant, Alibaba MMC, performed surprisingly well in the ice cream category. Tao Tao explained that community group buying focuses on family consumption scenarios, so ice cream packaging is often large, with multiple sticks per case. In Xi'an, Hema Market's average price per case is about 24 yuan, Duoduo Maicai is around 14 yuan, and Meituan Youxuan is slightly lower than Duoduo Maicai. A higher price per case helps spread cold chain costs. "Currently, only Hema Market can create a hit single ice cream product." Zhao Xiaomi, an ice cream supplier in Wuhan, participated in two '10,000-person group' activities at Hema Market in July. He explained that '10,000-person group' means a single ice cream SKU sells over 10,000 cases per day in one region—this is the industry's highest record, breaking the bottleneck of large-scale ice cream sales under the next-day delivery model. Zhao Xiaomi has been in the ice cream business for over a decade. Last year, he tried platforms like Xingsheng Youxuan and Shihui, but stopped cooperation due to fulfillment issues. This year, among all community group buying platforms, Zhao Xiaomi only supplies to Hema Market. Due to outstanding performance, Meituan Youxuan recently extended an olive branch to him. Wuhan is the most mature city for community group buying, and as one of China's four furnace cities, summer ice cream demand is strong, with all platforms treating it as a key category. Another ice cream supplier in Wuhan, Tang Youyou, said the industry's old problem was chaotic brand authorization. Most platforms had no entry barriers, allowing any supplier with low prices to supply. But the problem is that in the eastern Hubei region alone, Yili has over 70 first-tier distributors, and Mengniu has over 50, all holding inventory, leading to price wars. Tang Youyou had given up on community group buying channels, but this year, Yili's ice cream division in Shanghai directly connected him with Alibaba MMC, and he is willing to 'try again.' Now, his company sells over 3,000 cases of ice cream daily on Hema Market. According to Tang Youyou's observation, Meituan Youxuan's current strategy in Wuhan focuses on 'fewer SKUs, larger packaging'—ice cream cases contain 30-40 sticks, all of one flavor. "Ordinary people's freezers don't have that much space," he believes, such large-format products flow more to B-end rather than C-end consumers. Serving the B-end can boost GMV, but it's hard to generate repeat purchases. In contrast, Hema Market has over 20 SKUs, each with different ice cream combinations, leading to higher user activity and a much larger 'shelf capacity' than other platforms. Cold chain solutions behind ice cream Three weeks ago, Tao Tao sent a truck of ice cream from his company's cold storage to Hema Market's Xi'an warehouse. Upon arrival, the vehicle's temperature was checked and rejected because it didn't meet the requirement of 'not higher than -12 degrees Celsius.' Tao Tao felt helpless. In fact, selling ice cream in community group buying places very high demands on suppliers' daily fulfillment capabilities, including SKU breadth, hardware configuration, and the ability to mobilize temporary labor. Zhao Xiaomi, who participated in Hema Market's '10,000-person group' activity in Wuhan, arranged over 100 part-time workers that day specifically for packaging. According to him, the night before, workers needed to do the first round of sorting based on the platform's forecasted order volume—combining ice cream into foam boxes and freezing them overnight. At 11 a.m. the next day, workers did the second round of packaging, adding dry ice to the pre-sorted foam boxes, sealing, and labeling. The 11 a.m. dry ice addition was a time set after multiple tests with Hema Market. "Dry ice can't be added too early or too late," Zhao Xiaomi said. If too early, the dry ice sublimates by the time it reaches the central warehouse, failing to meet weight requirements; if too late, the packaging workload is too heavy to deliver on time. Despite the painful adjustment period, Zhao Xiaomi is confident in the new channel. In July, his company's ice cream sales surged with the platform, and he expects Hema Market to account for 35% of his company's total channel sales this year. The fact that community group buying platforms outsource packaging to suppliers doesn't constitute the platform's cold chain capability. What truly reflects platform strength is that after supplier delivery, the entire cold chain must be maintained, slowing dry ice sublimation and ensuring products reach users intact. In other words, besides suppliers, every link—central warehouse, grid warehouse, and pickup points—is crucial. To save costs, some platforms don't build cold storage at central warehouses, at most adding dry ice at grid warehouses, which shifts costs onto grid warehouse franchisees and still risks thawing. A community group buying practitioner told New Distribution that Duoduo Maicai has stopped treating fresh produce as a key category at this stage because cold chain is out of control at the group leader end, failing to ensure consumer experience. To maintain GMV, the platform now focuses on 'large items' like rice, flour, and cooking oil. But he believes community group buying platforms must pay more attention to infrastructure construction, otherwise they can't win this community commerce battle. Opportunities for latecomers At the beginning of the year, Duoduo Maicai, Meituan Youxuan, and Chengxin Youxuan set high performance targets. But currently, these original goals are difficult to achieve. The difficulties of leading players are also opportunities for latecomers. The aforementioned practitioner said that as the industry pace slows, Alibaba MMC is narrowing the gap with leading players in some regions. Alibaba's Q1 FY2022 financial report confirms this—MMC's GMV grew over 200% quarter-over-quarter. Additionally, according to 36Kr, Xingsheng Youxuan is about to complete a new $300 million financing round; according to Dige News, Shihuituan is also preparing a new financing round exceeding $1 billion. The industry is far from the endgame, and the landscape can change at any time. Over the past decade, internet companies' habitual thinking was to grab scale first, then refine operations. Against the backdrop of tighter policy, leading platforms finally stopped overemphasizing scale and were forced into a rhythm of 'grabbing territory while making up homework.' This is a good thing for the industry. In infrastructure investment, cold chain is just one dimension; products, warehousing and distribution, and channels all follow the same logic. Sharpening the axe doesn't delay cutting wood; in this recognized long-term battle, slow is fast. The final victory will surely belong to companies that are steady and have long-termism. *(Tao Tao, Zhao Xiaomi, and Tang Youyou are pseudonyms) Are you 'watching' me?