Cold chain losses at 5%-8% with no party taking accountability: Yongdong Intelligence uses RFID to reduce the loss rate to within 3%
A large portion of the profits of chain catering businesses is not taken away by competitors, but leaks quietly along the long chain from factories to back kitchens.
There is a long-standing yet hard-to-settle account in the industry: the loss rate in cold chain transportation links usually ranges from 5% to 8%, and reaches as high as 10% to 12% for some enterprises. Coupled with material waste in back-kitchen processing and inventory count discrepancies at stores, the overall food ingredient loss rate often falls in the range of 12% to 18%. For a chain brand with an annual revenue of tens of millions of yuan, this is a kind of expenditure with no invoices, no responsible persons and no traceability.
The solution proposed by Yondong Intelligence is radio frequency identification (RFID). Founded in 2014, the team migrated the RFID technology that had been polished in the parking lot scenario for six years to the catering supply chain, assigning a unique digital identity to each package of raw materials, so that the whole chain covering factories, warehousing, logistics and store production can be recorded and audited in real time. The system has been fully deployed at Station Pizza, a chain pizza brand with a history of more than 20 years, reducing its overall loss rate from 15% to less than 3%.
At present, Yondong Intelligence has launched its Pre-A round of financing.
From Parking Lots to Back Kitchens: Cross-border Entry of an RFID Team
The technical foundation of Yondong Intelligence is not SaaS, but radio frequency signals.
Before entering the catering sector, the team had been engaged in internet parking services for six years, fully experiencing the technical iteration of parking lots from manual ticket tearing to scan-to-pay, and then to contactless payment: 13.56MHz near-field communication is used for access card swiping and ground sensor triggering, 2.4GHz ultra-high frequency is used for long-distance vehicle identification, and 5.8GHz microwave supports ETC non-stop toll collection. This experience has precipitated three capabilities that exactly correspond to the three most difficult things in the RFID supply chain: the capability of radio frequency environment engineering, that is, antenna deployment, power adjustment and interference suppression, which is the core know-how of the later "RFID holographic perception cabin"; high-concurrency data processing, where identification, barrier lifting and fee deduction for dozens of vehicles per second at the peak of thousands of parking lots are completed at the millisecond level, and this architecture is migrated to the batch RFID reading scenario; and the thinking mode of software and hardware integration, which naturally considers the linkage between data collection and business systems while doing hardware perception.
In 2020, the team dived into the catering supply chain with this set of technical genes. The opportunity came from Station Pizza — in order to achieve standardization, this established chain pre-mixed the raw materials of each pizza into material packages in the factory, and then distributed them to the central warehouse through cold chain, then to secondary warehouses in various provinces and cities, and finally to the stores. The longer the link, the more loopholes: goods are lost midway, the quantity deviates, and near-expiry and parallel goods cannot be supervised. Employees in the back kitchen of the store grab cheese and meat slices casually, the dosage depends on feeling, the taste is unstable, and the loss is even untraceable.
"Traditional ERP manages 'quantity' instead of 'objects'." Yondong Intelligence positions itself as a solution provider for the supply chain data acquisition layer, located between the traditional ERP/WMS and physical goods, acting as the digital nerve ending. The team spent five years working with Station Pizza step by step to build this system from scratch, and it was officially launched and put into operation at Station Pizza in 2023.
Promoting Management Granularity from "Box" to "Package"
The first change after the system was implemented is that raw materials have their own identities.
At the factory end, the material packages pass through the customized RFID conveyor belt, the dynamic power adjustment adapts to different packaging materials such as aluminum foil, plastic and paper boxes, and the unique ID is written with a "beep". When the goods arrive at the central warehouse and regional warehouses, they are pushed into the specially designed "RFID holographic perception cabin", where the whole pallet and whole box are read in batches at the second level and put into storage automatically, and an alarm will be triggered immediately if one package is missing. From the central warehouse to the regional warehouse and then to the store, each handover at every station is signed and confirmed by RFID reading, so it is clear at a glance whether the goods are lost midway. In the store production link, each customer order is bound to one material package one by one. The producer must read the information of the material package to confirm that the category is correct, within the shelf life, and matches the order before finishing the product — production cannot be completed without reading, and taking one more package will lead to inconsistency between accounts and actual inventory.
Behind this process are three technical difficulties overcome by the team.
The first one is the label cost. The industry usually regards RFID labels as one-time consumables, with a single procurement cost of 0.3 to 0.5 yuan. For chain catering that consumes thousands of packages per day, the annual cost can reach hundreds of thousands of yuan. Yondong Intelligence adopts rewritable chips (UCODE series, supporting 100,000 erasing and writing cycles), and builds a self-owned label recycling and erasing system: after the label is used in the store with the material package, it is recycled to the factory, erased old data and rewritten with special equipment before being put into use again. A single label can be recycled more than 100 times, the single use cost is reduced to less than 0.005 yuan, and the marginal cost is close to zero.
The second one is reading in low temperature environments. The cold chain scenario has three layers of interference: low temperature leads to decreased chip sensitivity, high water content of frozen food will absorb radio frequency signals, and condensed water changes antenna impedance. The industry's average full-box reading success rate is only 60% to 70%. Through dynamic matching circuit of antenna impedance, multi-frequency point frequency hopping reading and redundancy check, and optimization of antenna layout in the perception cabin, the team has increased the full-box reading success rate in -18℃ environment to more than 98%.
The third one is the coupling depth with ERP. Many systems claim to "connect to ERP", but actually they throw documents at regular intervals, and inconsistent data on both sides is the norm. What Yondong Intelligence realizes with Oracle EBS is transaction-level two-way synchronization: after business actions such as purchase receipt, store consumption, inventory adjustment and cost carry-forward are generated in the system, the purchase receipt transaction processing, miscellaneous outbound and cost vouchers on the Oracle side are generated synchronously in real time. This means that the customer's supply chain data can directly enter the financial accounting system. If there are plans for financing or listing in the future, auditors can directly track the whole story of each package of raw materials in Oracle.
In horizontal comparison, McDonald's China launched the "one code for one box" project in 2024, upgraded it to version 2.0 in 2025, and promised to complete 100% coverage from suppliers, logistics to restaurants in 2026. In this upgrading process, the problem to be overcome is exactly the decline in recognition rate caused by radio frequency identification being blocked by liquid and metal — which is the same root as the problem solved by Yondong Intelligence in low temperature and packaging material scenarios. The difference is that Yondong Intelligence has promoted the management granularity from "box" to "package", realizing single-item-level management and control.
From Project-based Delivery to Productization
Up to now, the system has covered 1 central warehouse, 5 regional secondary warehouses and more than 40 stores, realizing RFID digital management of the whole chain from raw material entering the factory to store production. Calculated based on 10 stores with an annual revenue of 50 million yuan, the loss rate reduced from 15% to 3% means that the food ingredient cost expenditure drops from 7.5 million yuan to 1.5 million yuan, releasing about 6 million yuan per year. The team emphasizes that Station Pizza is a real benchmark case, and relevant operational data can be verified through on-site inspection.
In terms of business model, Yondong Intelligence is shifting from project-based delivery to a productized structure of "SaaS subscription + hardware leasing + label service": the software charges annual fee according to the number of stores, hardware equipment is provided in the form of monthly rent to lower the customer's decision-making threshold, and label recycling management is billed according to usage. The system also supports identification methods such as 1D barcode and 2D barcode. Customers with limited budget can deploy the core module first, and seamlessly upgrade to RFID after the scale expands.
At the channel level, the team clearly states that it will not compete with ERP and catering SaaS vendors, but complement them in the form of middleware: catering SaaS vendors can sell it as an advanced function of the supply chain section, ERP implementation service providers are responsible for the financial module, Yondong Intelligence is responsible for supply chain data collection and audit, and hardware integrators undertake the deployment and commissioning of the perception cabin. At present, the team provides standard API/SDK externally, supporting Restful and WebSocket, as well as hardware deployment scheme design, label recycling operation system construction and co-branding authorization.
The target customer profile is therefore quite clear: chain brands with more than 5 stores that are shifting from "human-based management" to "system-based management", trapped in inconsistent monthly inventory counts, persistently high loss rates, and equipped with a central factory distribution link. Pizza and Western fast food are the first tracks to enter, and formats such as hot pot, baking, tea drinks and fresh retail have the same replication conditions; looking further outward, industries with demand for single-item-level tracking such as clothing, medicine and 3C electronics are also within the scope of adaptation.
The industry window is opening. The 2026 White Paper on the Development of China's Catering Chain-ization jointly released by the China Chain Operation Association and Meituan shows that the chain-ization rate of China's catering industry has increased year by year from 21% in 2023 to 25% in 2025, with an average annual growth of 2 percentage points. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that the national catering revenue reached 5.7982 trillion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 3.2%. It is worth noting that the number of stores of small chain brands with 3 to 10 stores decreased by 18.5% year-on-year, weak risk resistance and imperfect supply chain are listed as the main reasons, while brands with a scale of 101 to 1000 stores have become the main growth force. At the same time, the listing of chain catering enterprises in Hong Kong continues to heat up, and capitalization puts forward stricter requirements for data compliance — which is also the reason why Yondong Intelligence takes Oracle transaction-level docking as its core selling point.
According to market research institutions, the global food traceability technology market size was about 17.9 billion US dollars in 2025, and is expected to grow to 42.6 billion US dollars by 2035, with a compound annual growth rate of about 9.07%, among which RFID is one of the fastest growing segments.
The funds raised in this Pre-A round will be mainly invested in three aspects: standardized finalization and mass production preparation of core hardware (RFID holographic perception cabin, label erasing and writing equipment, etc.); SaaS transformation of the software platform to shorten the deployment cycle for new customers; and market expansion around the pizza and Western fast food tracks, to win the second batch of paying customers beyond Station Pizza. The team said that after the number of benchmark customers increases to 3 to 5 and the system productization is basically completed, it will consider introducing strategic investors with industrial resources to accelerate cross-category expansion.