S.lab Asia diversifies with fresh-food delivery box sales

Cold-chain logistics startup S.Lab Asia is diversifying its business by selling Greeny Box, a delivery box for fresh food.

Greeny Box uses a specialized fabric that blocks external heat, maintaining a consistent temperature for 24 hours without electricity to keep products fresh. Ongoing product development has improved its durability and capacity, while the box protects fresh foods such as fruit, vegetables and seafood from outside temperatures.

Equipped with IoT devices, the box enables real-time monitoring of its location and temperature. Its insulation performance is 11 times better than that of conventional Styrofoam boxes. In an in-house test shipping clams from Ganghwa Island to Singapore, the temperature inside Greeny Box varied by just 2.6°C, allowing live clams to arrive fresh without temperature-related stress.

In recognition of the product’s performance, S.Lab Asia has signed a series of supply contracts with Korean and international companies in the ultra-fresh logistics business.

In September, the company signed a contract with Singapore premium supermarket Chorok Market. Delivery times in Singapore are short, but the high temperature and humidity make shipping fresh food far more challenging than in Korea. Customer complaints also tend to be more common for products where freshness is critical. Even so, fresh deliveries have increased significantly as more people work from home since the COVID-19 pandemic. Greeny Box is set to be used for “last-mile delivery” of fresh food from the supermarket to customers’ homes and is currently being piloted. S.Lab Asia also plans to supply Greeny Box to Singaporean retailer Cold Storage.

The company has also supplied around 3,000 Greeny Boxes to Nature Dream, a Korean iCOOP consumer cooperative. The boxes will be used to keep seafood fresh as it is delivered to Nature Dream stores nationwide.

“Greeny Box also helps reduce the use of disposable items such as Styrofoam boxes and dry ice, which are commonly used to deliver fresh food,” said Lee Soo-ah, CEO of S.Lab Asia. “Building on our existing cross-border cold-chain logistics business, we will expand by selling Greeny Box.”