Customers buy food at a supermarket in HCM City. — VNA/VNS Photo

HCM CITY — HCM City needs to develop a cold storage system and raw material storage areas for the food processing industry, the Food and Foodstuff Association of HCM City said.

The two projects play an important role in the development of the city's food processing industry in the 2021-2030 period. The industry is among the four key industries that the city prioritises, it said.

Lý Kim Chi, chairwoman of the association, said the city currently has many cold storages units but they are at small scale and not that modern, so they do not meet all the requirements for cold storage.

The municipal government, therefore, has approved a cold storage system development project and assigned the city Department of Industry and Trade in collaboration with the association to deploy it, she said.

The cold storage units will have an average area of 5-10ha and be located at areas with convenient traffic and not too far the city centre. They must be at international quality to store and preserve many groups of goods, including imported ones and locally produced products, she said.

“But we have not found an appropriate site for building the cold storage despite making intensive searches,” she said.

Funds for building the cold storage system are contributed by businesses in the industry. The association did not ask the city government to fund for the project, but wanted the city to have policies to support the industry to implement the project, she said.

Chi said a material storage area is very important to the food processing industry, adding that currently, material inputs for food processing firms in the city are mainly supplied by farmers in the southwest provinces.

Therefore, the industry needs to link with provinces to build stable material storage areas for each commodity, and instruct farmers to adopt certain requirements in their crop production to yield clean raw materials so firms can process products for export to fastidious markets such as the US and EU, she said.

Building raw material storage areas should go in tandem with logistics development. The current transport infrastructure is not that good, pushing up costs to firms. If ring roads that connect the city with neighbouring provinces are soon completed, they would help HCM City food processing enterprises reduce costs, she said.

While other sectors witnessed a drop in revenue last year, the food and foodstuff sector recorded over 10 per cent growth in revenue in 2002, and enterprises have had many export orders from several markets for this year, Chi said. — VNS