For years, vegetable cultivation in greenhouses has been heavily dependent on experience, and vegetables produced in other places are often passed off as local products. Hupengxian uses AI-based digital SaaS to open up the short supply chain directly from greenhouses to communities.
AI-powered digital SaaS solves the production-marketing separation problem of Shanghai's greenhouses, while Hupeng Fresh Select explores a new model for locally grown vegetables
The local protected vegetable industry in Shanghai is facing the practical challenge of mismatch between the production end and the consumption end. On the one hand, large-scale contiguous greenhouse bases around the city produce a large number of locally grown vegetables, which have natural advantages in freshness and geographical proximity; on the other hand, problems such as non-local vegetables being fraudulently sold as local produce, price markup by multi-layer middlemen, and asymmetric production and marketing information continue to exist, making it difficult for high-quality local agricultural products to directly reach the urban consumer market. At the same time, traditional greenhouse production relies on manual experience and lacks low-cost, implementable digital tools, and the planting data of bases is scattered. The industry is in urgent need of an integrated solution that takes into account production management and production-marketing circulation.
Build a digital platform for greenhouses to connect the entire chain from production to community consumption
Hupeng Fresh Select is a smart agriculture project incubated through industry-university-research collaboration by the School of Agriculture and Biology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The project focuses on the local protected greenhouse scenarios in Shanghai, builds an AI-powered smart protected greenhouse digital SaaS platform, and constructs a short-radius origin-to-consumption system featuring direct supply from greenhouses to communities.
On the production side, the platform supports local private deployment of AI models, so that the original planting data of greenhouse environment and crop growth do not need to be uploaded to the public network, ensuring the data security of agricultural bases. The system connects to various sensing hardware in greenhouses to collect production data such as temperature, humidity, water, fertilizer and light, and completes pest and disease identification, planting risk warning and auxiliary suggestions for water and fertilizer strategies through AI, helping greenhouse operators reduce reliance on experience and improve the production management efficiency of protected greenhouses.
On the circulation side, the platform builds a closed-loop business that connects the origin directly to communities. Relying on the resources of physical greenhouse bases, it connects the chains of greenhouse merchants, community outlets and end consumers, realizes the complete process of locally grown vegetables from greenhouse harvesting, order transfer, distribution to community outlets to user self-pickup, compresses the intermediate wholesale and circulation links, and shortens the distance of local vegetables from the field to citizens' dining tables.
Based on physical base resources to lay the foundation for project implementation
Different from pure online agricultural platforms, Hupeng Fresh Select is supported by a 500-mu connected protected greenhouse physical base as the demonstration carrier of the project, providing a real industrial scenario for product iteration and model verification. The project team members have accumulated experience in agricultural industry practice and digital product development, and rely on the scientific research resources of the agricultural discipline of Shanghai Jiao Tong University to realize the transformation of scientific research achievements into industrial scenarios.
At present, the platform is in the stage of product R&D and iteration, taking the real needs of front-line greenhouse operators as the orientation of product iteration, and prioritizing the polishing of functional modules adapted to local greenhouses in Shanghai. The demonstration base also undertakes the role of demonstration verification, which is used to run through the digital production management and the greenhouse-community production and marketing model, so as to accumulate reusable practical experience for subsequent replication and promotion to more protected greenhouses around Shanghai.
Aiming at the local Shanghai market to explore the commercialization path of urban agriculture
In terms of market space, Shanghai has a huge resource of protected vegetable greenhouses, and urban consumers have continuous consumption demand for fresh, traceable local vegetables. However, most traditional agricultural digital products are biased towards general solutions, lacking in-depth local adaptation for Shanghai's urban protected agriculture, which also leaves market opportunities for the project.
The business model of Hupeng Fresh Select consists of multiple parts: it provides SaaS digital services for B-end greenhouse entities, obtains transaction-related revenue relying on the direct supply chain from origin, and supports supporting derivative agricultural value-added services. The project plans to complete market expansion in stages: first complete the closed-loop verification of the demonstration model, then gradually expand the number of connected greenhouse bases, serve more planting entities and urban communities, and explore a smart agriculture commercialization path suitable for the surrounding areas of metropolises.