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A lone figure walking through a dimly lit cold storage corridor
Council for Cold Chain Technologies and Policies

A fifth of it never arrives.

Food and medicine worth more than three trillion dollars move through the world’s cold chains each year. Around a fifth is lost on the way — not for want of technology, but for want of agreement. C3TP is the Council built to create it.

Become a member See what we are fixing
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>3T
dollars of products depend on cold chains to reach a consumer
~20%
of those goods are lost in transport and storage
4%
of global greenhouse gas emissions come from that loss
~225M
people go hungry each year in India alone

The promise

Before it is an industry, the cold chain is a promise — that what left the farm or the factory still works when it arrives.

Three categories carry most of that promise. Each has a global market measured in trillions, and an Indian market large enough that a percentage point of loss is a national number.

A worker moving between shelves of perishable goods in a cold store

Pharmaceuticals

USD 1.5T
USD 70 billion in India

Vaccines and biologics fail silently. A temperature excursion leaves no trace a patient can see.

Large insulated ice containers stacked outdoors

Meat and seafood

USD 1.3T
USD 40 billion in India

The least forgiving cargo in the chain, and the most exposed to a break in transit.

Stacked crates of fruit inside a temperature-controlled ripening facility

Dairy and produce

USD 0.8T
USD 68 billion in India

Millions of smallholders feed this chain. They absorb the loss when it fails.

Market sizes from industry reports; hunger figure from FAO, Global Hunger Index 2022; loss figure from FAO and expert interviews.

An empty warehouse with steel columns and a bare concrete floor

Where it breaks

The chain rarely breaks inside a cold store. It breaks in the handovers — the moments when the goods change hands and nobody owns the record.

Where temperature is lost along the cold chain A temperature trace across six stages of the cold chain. The trace stays inside the safe band while goods are in one operator’s care, and rises above it at each of the three handovers between operators, where custody and data change hands. safe temperature band warmer no pre-cooling record loading dock, unmonitored manual paperwork at transfer Producer Pack house Transport Cold store, distribution, retail Three operators. Three handovers. No shared record across any of them.
Illustrative. Losses concentrate at transfers of custody, where responsibility for the goods moves but responsibility for the data does not move with it.

An industry of smallholders

Thousands of small operators work alongside a few large ones. No single actor is big enough to impose a standard on the rest.

Margins too thin to experiment

Low earnings across the industry make unilateral investment in new technology hard to justify, however sound the case.

Systems that cannot talk

The technology already exists. What is missing is an agreed way for one operator’s systems to speak to the next one’s.

The arithmetic

Why no one can fix this alone

Connecting two systems is a project. Connecting an industry to itself, one pair at a time, is arithmetic that defeats everybody.

Six systems that each speak only to each other need fifteen separate integrations. Twelve need sixty-six. Every one of them is built twice, paid for twice and maintained forever — and none of them survives a change of vendor.

Agree one specification and the arithmetic inverts. Each system implements it once. The cost of joining the chain stops rising with the size of the chain.

A standard is not a technical document. It is the cheapest way an industry has ever found to trust itself.
Point-to-point integration compared with a shared specification On the left, six systems each connected to every other system, needing fifteen integrations. On the right, the same six systems each connected once to a shared specification, needing six. C3TPspecWMSTMSSensorsERPFinanceRegulatorWMSTMSSensorsERPFinanceRegulator Point to point 15 integrations to build and keep One shared specification 6 integrations, each built once →
With n systems, point-to-point needs n(n−1)/2 integrations; a shared specification needs n. At twelve systems that is sixty-six against twelve.
Two logistics workers discussing operations on a storage floor

A room, not a platform

So the work is not to build another platform. It is to build the room where competitors can agree — and the rules that make the agreement hold.

C3TP is a non-profit, member-only council. It distributes no surplus; membership contributions and project funding go to the work programme and nowhere else. It is hosted at ARTPARK, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru — an academic host, deliberately, so that the specifications belong to no member’s commercial interest.

Mission

To enable zero-waste, sustainable cold chains by accelerating the adoption of technology through innovation, standardisation and policy development.

Vision

To become the world’s leading membership organisation for innovations, technology standards and policies for zero-waste, sustainable cold chains.

The method

Four layers, one outcome: trust

Trust is the binding constraint on cold chain digitisation — not sensors, not software. It is built in layers, and each layer is worthless without the one beneath it.

Technology

Reference architectures that integrate the sub-systems already deployed in the field, rather than replacing them.

Data

Common models and exchange protocols, so one operator’s record means the same thing to the next operator.

Standards

Specifications agreed by consensus and validated against field conditions before anyone is asked to adopt them.

Policy

Instruments and incentives that give those specifications legal and commercial standing, which is what turns a good idea into practice.

How the Council builds trust Four stacked layers — technology at the base, then data, then standards, then policy at the top — with trust accumulating upwards and adoption following from the top layer. Policygives it standingStandardsmakes it sharedDatamakes it comparableTechnologymakes it measurable trust accumulates Remove a layer and the one above it stops holding.

How a deliverable is made

A Steering Committee picks the item. A Working Group open to every member drafts it. It is tested against field conditions. It is published to the membership and carried into policy. Members who contributed intellectual property are rewarded fairly; members who need access get it.

The work

What the Council is building first

Four blueprints, each with a named outcome and a Working Group behind it. None is a product. Every one is published to the membership.

01

Reference Architecture for Cold Chains

A blueprint of the sub-systems that can be integrated to give real-time monitoring and analytics across an operator’s estate.

Interoperable system design
02

Cold Chain Analytics Framework

The indicators that actually predict waste and energy use, defined once so two operators’ numbers can be put side by side.

Comparable performance measurement
03

Real-time Reconciliation Framework

Smart contracts and distributed ledger applied to the paperwork — eliminating physical documents and manual SLA reconciliation.

Lower transaction cost
04

Policy and Regulatory Framework

The instruments, incentives and regulatory recommendations that let the first three be adopted at national scale.

Legal standing and adoption

And where those blueprints land

Proof of delivery
Safety, health and origin certificates
Letters of credit and logistics finance
Real-time information exchange
Integrated cold chain systems
Cold chain analytics
Community tokenomics
Member-proposed special projects

Membership

Who is in the room — and what they take away

Membership is open across the ecosystem. Choose the description that fits you.

Pallets and storage racking in a modern warehouse

Enterprises and brand owners

You carry the cost of every failure in a chain you do not operate.

  • Less wastage and fewer claims, measured the same way across every partner
  • Performance data you can compare between logistics providers
  • Influence over the specifications your suppliers will be asked to adopt

Join as this kind of member

The rules

Member-led, by consensus, on the record

A council only works if no member can quietly capture it. The structure is deliberately plain, and every decision is minuted.

Become a member

Board Elected. Sets strategy, approves the work programme and budget, admits members.
Advisory Eminent individuals and institutional experts guiding strategic direction.
Steering Committees Empowered by the Board. Decide which items Working Groups take up.
Working Groups Open to every member. Deliverables by consensus, field-validated before release.
Secretariat Hosted at ARTPARK. Keeps the register, the records and the publications.
IPR policy Fair reward for contributors, balanced against members’ need to access technology.
Principles Openness, neutrality, consensus, relevance, and a systems approach.

Founding members

Who has already signed up

The Council was founded by an academic host, a deep-tech institution and an industry partner — the three kinds of member it exists to bring together.

Indian Institute of Science
Host institution
ARTPARK
Secretariat and technology
Bosch
Industry partner

Add your organisation to this wall

A worker moving a pallet between stacked boxes and shelving

The chain is only as good as the agreement behind it.

Enterprises, providers, institutions, regulators and individuals are invited to join the Council and shape the first work programme.

Become a member info@c3tp.org