Background
Lychee is a specialty fruit of my hometown, but it’s quite picky about where it grows. Only a few areas in China—and even fewer around the world—have the right conditions to cultivate it. Each year, Maoming produces nearly 630,000 tons of lychees. Due to their perishable nature, lychees rapidly lose value after harvest, necessitating immediate packing and shipping to reach distributors and consumers at their peak freshness. Yet, despite this urgency, I noticed that lychees in supermarkets still sell for as high as 27 RMB ($3.70) per kilogram. But when I spoke with lychee farmers at the orchards, I discovered that they only make about 3 RMB ($0.41) per kilogram.
Investigation
This disparity led me to dig deeper. I learned that the price of lychees climbs significantly as they pass through layers of intermediaries, with each middleman raising the price by three to four times. Meanwhile, the farmers who put in all the hard work don’t see a single cent of the added profit. One farmer’s words stuck with me: “In a harvest year, we make maybe 40,000 to 80,000 RMB ($5,600 to $11,200), but in a bad year, we take a loss. Lychee trees need a lot of pesticides because of the sweet flesh; for every ten trees, we need to use a bottle of pesticide every two weeks, and each bottle costs over 400 RMB ($56). If we have a poor harvest, we can barely survive.”
Taking Action
Feeling their hardship, I wanted to help. That’s why we organized and joined an online campaign to sell lychees directly. Through TikTok live streaming, we could bypass the middlemen and let the farmers earn more, while consumers paid less—a win-win situation. We introduced many farmers to the idea of e-commerce live streaming. I hope this approach can inspire wider adoption, bringing online opportunities to rural areas so that everyone can live a better life.
The Last Mile Challenge
To address the “last-mile” challenge of lychee delivery, we analyzed logistical bottlenecks and proposed a solution to SF Express. Using data-driven methods such as K-Means Clustering, we identified optimal locations for temporary cold-chain drop-off points. With their support, refrigerated trucks were deployed directly to the village during the harvest season, allowing farmers to transport their lychees with ease and preserve their freshness.
