Part 3 of 3 in the CNG/CGD retail-mapping series — with Part 1 (CGD GA district allotments) and Part 2 (82k geocoded retail outlets). Served live from GitHub Pages.
Why overlay these two networks at all
Cold storage and fuel retail don't obviously belong on the same map, but they share a real, practical dependency: a cold-chain facility needs reliable power and, increasingly, a nearby fuel or gas source for backup generation and for the reefer trucks moving product in and out — and a fuel-retail outlet already has land, road access, grid power, and (at a growing share of sites) a natural-gas connection sitting on-site for an entirely different purpose. Part 2 of this series mapped India's roughly 82,000 geocoded retail outlets and the CNG supply chain behind them; this map asks where that same outlet network sits relative to the country's cold-storage capacity, since the two together define a lot of what's actually possible for last-mile perishables logistics in a given district.
The station-type question matters here too
Not every fuel outlet on the underlying network is equally useful to a cold-chain operator planning around it. As Part 2 lays out in more detail, CNG-dispensing outlets split into pipeline-connected mother and online stations, which run their own compressors and carry the heavier capital cost of that compression capacity, and daughter or daughter-booster stations, which have no pipeline connection and instead decant already-compressed gas from mobile cascades trucked in from a mother station. A cold-storage or reefer-fleet operator weighing whether to co-locate near a given outlet, or to fuel a fleet of CNG-run reefer trucks from it, is really asking which of those station types it is — a mother or online station's continuous, high-capacity compression is a materially different proposition, both for gas availability and for potential shared backup-power planning, than a daughter station's cascade-dependent, lower-capex setup that can run short between refill trips.
Biogas as the connective tissue between the two networks
The link back to cold storage specifically runs through compressed biogas (CBG). CBG plants distribute their output through the same cascade-cylinder and pipeline routes that already serve CNG retail outlets under the government's SATAT scheme, which means a cluster of cold-storage facilities near a biogas-fed retail outlet has a genuinely local, agriculture-linked fuel source available for backup generation or reefer-fleet fuelling — gas produced from the same district's own agricultural or dairy waste streams, rather than fossil CNG trucked or piped in from further away. This blog's separate reporting on data-centre and telecom-tower backup power found the same underlying economics apply generally: gas gensets run meaningfully cheaper than diesel ones on a per-unit basis, and a cold-storage facility's backup-power decision sits on exactly that same cost curve. Whether any specific cold-storage site on this map is actually positioned to use a nearby biogas-fed outlet this way is a site-by-site question this overlay can only suggest, not answer — but that's precisely the kind of question a map putting both networks in the same view is meant to prompt.
What the cold-chain side actually looks like on the ground
Two listed Indian companies illustrate the range of scale the "cold-storage" dots on this map can represent. Snowman Logistics, a subsidiary of Gateway Distriparks and describing itself as India's only listed pure-play temperature-controlled logistics operator, runs the largest network of its kind in the country: 44 cold-storage and dry warehouses across 21 cities, over 3 million square feet of facility area, a combined pallet capacity above 1,41,000, and a fleet of 600-plus vehicles including dedicated reefer trucks and 40-foot trailers. That's the large-scale, network end of the cold chain — exactly the kind of operator for whom a fuel-outlet's station type (mother/online versus daughter/booster) and its gas source (fossil CNG versus CBG) would matter at fleet-fuelling scale, not just at one site.
Flex Foods Ltd, listed separately on the NSE and BSE, sits at the other end: a single-location processor based in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, running individually-quick-frozen (IQF), air-dried, canned, and freeze-dried processing lines for mushrooms, herbs, fruits, and vegetables, built around its own on-site cold storage rather than a distributed warehouse network. A processor like this depends on the cold chain locally — getting product in and finished goods out reliably — rather than operating the cold chain as its own distributed business the way Snowman does. Between them, the two companies sketch the actual shape of the industry this map is trying to visualise: a small number of large, asset-heavy network operators, and a much larger population of single-site processors and cold stores whose fuel and power planning is a local, not a network-wide, decision.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
