Asia fruit progress on the online cloud conference of Asia fruit and vegetable international conference (AFC cloud meeting) officially opened at 2:00 p.m. Singapore / Beijing time on November 17. The key message conveyed in the opening meeting "going digital: new tracks for Asia's fresh product supply chain" is that the outbreak of covid-19 has accelerated the digitization process at both ends of the Asian supply chain.

Annabel Robertson, head of Southeast Asian retail, sales and shopper practice at Kantar, provides the necessary background for the theme of the conference with her professional insights into the digital evolution of fresh food retail and markets across Asia.

Robertson said the outbreak has added new vitality to Asia's explosive retail growth. It is estimated that 185 million households in Asia will purchase daily necessities through e-commerce platforms this year.

She said Asian consumers have shown a degree of caution about returning to physical stores after the outbreak, which shows that the mass migration to digital retail is sustainable. "Southeast Asians are expected to be 1.5 times less likely to go out (shopping) in the future than in the United States," she explained. "Great changes have taken place in consumer behavior, which will affect how and where people will shop in the future."

The focus of the meeting then turned to digitization of the upstream supply chain. In an interview with Chris white, executive director of frutnet media international, Singapore's dimuto chief executive officer Lu Fuquan explained how his company used blockchain technology to solve many problems in the current fresh agricultural supply chain.