From Delivery Food to Insulin: Instant Retail Enters Pharmaceutical Cold Chain

In August 2026, Taobao Flash Sale, together with pharmaceutical companies and chain pharmacies, launched pharmaceutical cold-chain delivery services in six cities: Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xi'an, Suzhou, and Wenzhou. Unlike ordinary medicine delivery, this pilot introduced disposable express insulated boxes and incorporated temperature control and drug traceability into the delivery process.

At first glance, this looks like instant retail adding a new product category.

But from an industry perspective, it is more like a dividing line: once platforms begin delivering temperature-sensitive medicines such as insulin and biologics, instant retail is no longer responsible only for getting products to the customer. It must also take on clearer process responsibility for temperature, timeliness, traceability, and exception handling after the medicine leaves the store.

Ordinary goods delivery is about being faster and cheaper; pharmaceutical cold chain tests whether a platform can build a quality system in minute-level fulfillment that is close to professional pharmaceutical logistics.

That also means pharmaceutical cold chain will not simply copy the food-delivery model.

01 Cold-chain growth is outpacing the overall market

The pharmaceutical circulation industry has already entered a low-growth phase, but cold-chain infrastructure is still expanding.

According to the China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing's 2026 Report on the Development of China's Pharmaceutical Logistics and Supply Chain, China's pharmaceutical circulation market is expected to reach RMB 2,963.01 billion in 2025, up 0.54% year on year. The pharmaceutical cold-chain market is about RMB 628 billion, and cold-chain logistics costs are RMB 26.784 billion, up 1.96% year on year.

The change is even more obvious on the infrastructure side: in 2025, pharmaceutical cold-storage capacity is expected to reach 4.525 million cubic meters, up 5.43% year on year; pharmaceutical refrigerated trucks are expected to reach 16,206 units, up 3.2%.

(Source: Pharmaceutical Logistics and Supply Chain Branch of CFLP; compiled by Dongjian Research)

These figures reveal a structural contradiction: the overall pharmaceutical circulation market is growing by less than 1%, while cold storage and refrigerated vehicles are still expanding at a faster pace.

Companies are not expanding ordinary warehouses, but high-standard infrastructure capable of handling biologics, specialty drugs, and temperature-controlled medicines. The reason is that future growth in the pharmaceutical industry will increasingly depend on high-value, tightly temperature-controlled, and specialized products.

In the past, cold-chain construction mainly served large-volume transport between pharmaceutical companies, wholesalers, and hospitals. After instant retail entered the picture, the industry had to fill the temperature-control gap in the last few kilometers between pharmacies and patients.

Although this distance is the shortest, it may be the hardest part of the entire cold chain to standardize.

02 Incremental growth is shifting closer to the customer

Pharmaceutical instant retail is drawing attention not because the traditional medicine market is still expanding rapidly, but precisely because the industry as a whole has entered stock-based competition.

In 2025, total medicine sales across China's three major channels are expected to reach RMB 1,853.8 billion, down about 1% year on year. Sales at public hospitals fell 2.1% year on year, while retail pharmacy sales grew 2.4%. In the first quarter of 2026, all-channel medicine sales were RMB 416.8 billion, down 5.4% year on year, while the retail market still posted slight growth of 0.6%.

At the same time, pharmaceutical O2O continued to grow rapidly.

Public data show that the pharmaceutical O2O market exceeded RMB 50 billion in 2025, accounting for nearly 8% of medicine retail sales. As of August 2025, the O2O medicine market reached RMB 29.1 billion, up 29.6% year on year.

Note: the three major channels, retail market, and pharmaceutical O2O use different statistical scopes. The table is intended to observe channel shifts and should not be directly summed.

(Source: 2025 three-major-channel data from Menet; 2026 Q1 pharmaceutical market data from Zhongkang; 2025 O2O data from China Medical News; compiled by Dongjian Research)

The much faster growth of pharmaceutical O2O than the overall industry shows that consumers are not reducing all medicine purchases; they are simply choosing channels differently.

Demand for colds, fever, and gastrointestinal discomfort drove the first stage of instant medicine purchasing. With insulin, biologics, and some specialty drugs entering the mix, platforms have begun to reach more stable chronic-disease medication scenarios.

The latest data from the International Diabetes Federation estimate that China has about 148 million people aged 20 to 79 with diabetes, with a prevalence rate of about 11.9%. This figure cannot be directly equated with insulin users, but it is enough to show that chronic-disease medication supports a huge long-term service population.

Compared with emergency medicines, chronic-disease medicines have more stable repeat-purchase frequency, and users care more about medicine availability and delivery certainty. For platforms, the value of such orders is not just a one-time delivery fee; they may also connect to follow-up visits, e-prescriptions, pharmacist services, medication reminders, and health management.

That is also an important reason why platforms are willing to enter high-cost cold-chain scenarios.

03 The last mile is the hardest to replicate

Traditional pharmaceutical cold chain is mainly based on planned transportation.

Pharmaceutical companies and wholesalers can usually determine in advance the quantity of medicines, vehicle routes, handover times, and temperature requirements, spreading costs through full-truckload or bulk transport.

Instant retail, however, faces a different order structure:

Orders are generated at any time and are difficult to plan in advance; each order contains only a small quantity of medicine, making it impossible to spread costs through large-volume shipping; delivery addresses are scattered and ambient temperatures keep changing; users are highly sensitive to speed, yet the platform cannot lower quality standards in pursuit of faster delivery; once an over-temperature event occurs, questions arise over whether the medicine can still be used, who should record the loss, and how responsibility should be assigned.

Therefore, pharmaceutical cold chain is not about adding an insulated box to a courier's bag; it is about compressing a full medicine quality-management process into the last few kilometers.

According to the Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Pharmaceutical Sales, online medicine sellers must establish systems for medicine quality and safety, risk control, drug traceability, storage and delivery, adverse reaction reporting, and complaint handling. Prescription medicines must also ensure that the prescription source is genuine and reliable, and purchases must be made under real-name registration and reviewed before dispensing.

A temperature-controlled prescription medicine order therefore includes at least five steps:

(Source: the Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Pharmaceutical Sales and the Good Supply Practice for Pharmaceutical Products; compiled by Dongjian Research)

A delay in ordinary food delivery usually affects the customer experience; an abnormality in temperature-controlled medicine may involve efficacy and safety.

The core metrics of pharmaceutical cold chain are therefore not simply average delivery time, but compliant delivery rate, temperature compliance rate, exception handling rate, and record completeness rate.

04 What does a disposable cold-chain box solve?

One important reason Taobao Flash Sale adopted disposable express insulated boxes this time is that traditional reusable insulated boxes are not fully suited to instant retail.

Reusable equipment can reduce long-term material consumption, but it requires collection, cleaning, disinfection, inventory checks, and return-route dispatching. When orders are scattered across different communities, recovery costs may offset the benefits of reuse.

Disposable insulated boxes eliminate the return leg, allowing faster integration with existing courier networks and making them suitable for expanding coverage during the pilot stage.

But they mainly solve the delivery-container problem; they do not automatically solve the entire chain of quality responsibility.

Companies still need to answer:

How long the insulated box can maintain temperature under different seasons and city temperatures; how to verify the condition of the medicine and temperature-control materials before dispatch; whether temperature is continuously recorded during delivery; how the system alerts when the validated time limit is exceeded or temperature deviates; how medicine is handled after customer refusal, delivery delays, or packaging damage; and who bears the material cost and environmental pressure created by disposable boxes.

Disposable solutions are better suited to low-density, rapid-expansion stages, while reusable smart temperature-controlled boxes are better for high-density routes and high-value medicines.

In the future, the industry will likely not choose one over the other, but instead use tiered deployment based on medicine value, delivery radius, temperature-control requirements, and order density.

05 High growth does not mean high profit

The commercial appeal of pharmaceutical instant retail comes from high growth, and so does the risk.

After expanding cold-chain services, platforms must bear new costs such as temperature-control materials, equipment monitoring, pharmacist review, store training, system upgrades, exception write-offs, and customer after-sales service.

In 2025, pharmaceutical cold-chain logistics costs were about RMB 26.784 billion, up 1.96% year on year. Over the same period, cold-storage capacity grew 5.43% and refrigerated trucks grew 3.2%. Infrastructure is expanding faster than logistics costs, indicating that the cold-chain industry is increasing capacity investment, but whether new assets can quickly turn into high-density orders still needs to be tested.

For a single order, whether the cold-chain model can work mainly depends on four variables:

(Source: public information; compiled by Dongjian Research)

This determines that temperature-controlled medicines will not all be brought into instant retail at once.

The categories most likely to work first are those with higher average order value, stable repeat purchases, and clear patient demand for timely access to medicines. Medicines with low order value, low purchase frequency, and complex temperature-control requirements are difficult to support as standalone professional services unless delivery fees or pharmaceutical-company subsidies are available.

What the industry really needs to verify is not whether consumers are willing to buy medicine instantly, but who is willing to pay for the added cost of cold chain.

If the platform continues to subsidize the service over the long term, cost pressure may become more obvious as the business scales. If all costs are passed on to consumers, order conversion may fall.

06 Stores will become pharmaceutical nodes

After instant retail enters pharmaceutical cold chain, the role of offline pharmacies will also change.

In the past, pharmacies mainly relied on in-store foot traffic to generate sales. After joining the instant retail system, stores also serve as micro pharmaceutical warehouses in the city, prescription review nodes, cold-chain packaging nodes, and entry points for pharmaceutical services.

The number of stores is only the foundation; more important is whether stores can provide:

accurate real-time inventory; qualified pharmacist services; standardized cold-chain packaging; continuous temperature records; clear batch and traceability information; and standardized exception handling.

Public information from JD Health shows that in 2025, the number of its instant retail partner stores increased by more than 100% year on year, its service network covered 490 cities, and order volume grew by more than 200% year on year. The simultaneous expansion of stores and orders shows that the platform is rapidly increasing nearby supply density.

But the more stores there are, the harder quality management becomes.

Large chain pharmacies can centrally purchase temperature-control equipment, train staff, and connect information systems. If independent pharmacies cannot bear the equipment and compliance costs, they may become even more dependent on platforms or chain systems.

Pharmaceutical instant retail may therefore accelerate differentiation in the pharmacy industry: chain operators with supply chains, digital systems, and pharmacist resources will win more online orders, while stores that rely only on location and natural foot traffic may see their operating space continue to shrink.

07 The competitive focus will shift from speed to evidence

Instant retail platforms used to emphasize '30-minute delivery,' but pharmaceutical cold chain requires platforms to prove what happened during those 30 minutes.

When the medicine left the warehouse, which temperature-control packaging was used, whether the temperature remained normal during delivery, whether the courier was delayed, and who signed for the medicine all need to be recorded in a way that can be queried and verified.

In the future, users may receive not only a box of medicine, but also a digital 'temperature history.'

This record is both the basis for consumers to judge medicine quality and the foundation for assigning responsibility among pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, platforms, and delivery providers.

Therefore, the long-term moat of pharmaceutical cold chain will not be courier numbers alone, but whether three systems can truly be connected:

• the compliance system formed by prescriptions and pharmacists;
• the fulfillment system formed by pharmacy inventory and platform dispatch;
• the quality system formed by temperature records and drug traceability.

If these three systems cannot be connected, the platform can only provide faster medicine delivery. Only when they are truly integrated can instant retail upgrade from an emergency medicine-purchase tool to an off-hospital medication service entry point.

Regulatory boundaries also cannot be broken by speed. The Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Online Pharmaceutical Sales clearly state that special-category medicines such as vaccines and blood products may not be sold online. Stronger cold-chain capability does not mean platforms can endlessly expand the range of medicines sold online.

Delivery platforms also cannot replace doctors' diagnosis and treatment, algorithmic recommendations cannot replace pharmacist review, and fulfillment speed cannot be used to induce patients to buy prescription medicines.

Conclusion

From food delivery to insulin, what instant retail is crossing is not just a product category, but a much heavier responsibility system.

In 2025, the growth rate of the pharmaceutical distribution market was only 0.54%, yet the scale of pharma O2O had already surpassed RMB 50 billion; in the first quarter of 2026, total pharmaceutical omnichannel sales fell 5.4%, while retail still maintained slight growth. Incremental industry growth is shifting from traditional channels to online, out-of-store, and near-field services.

Cold chain has further opened up delivery space for chronic disease drugs, biologics, and specialty medicines, while also pushing instant retail into a more demanding stage of competition.

What platforms now need to prove is no longer just “how quickly it can be delivered,” but whether the entire process from a pharmacy’s outbound shipment to the patient’s receipt is safe, compliant, and traceable.

The companies that will truly build a moat in the future may not be the fastest in delivery, but rather those that can turn every temperature-controlled delivery into a trustworthy record at lower system cost.