Abstract: The largest number of fruits and vegetables are produced annually in the world, particularly in traditional agriculture in China. Correspondingly, refrigerated transportation is a crucial link to ensure the safety and quality of perishable food in a fully cold chain logistics. However, the transport of refrigerated vehicles still is less utilized nowadays, due mainly to the relatively high initial and maintenance costs, such as high energy consumption and expensive manual labor. Since an integrated vehicle body with a cold storage device is mostly adopted in the current equipment, there is an inevitable mismatch between the charging amount of phase change material (PCM) and transportation time, temperature with a narrow range, as well as a high center of gravity. Therefore, the purpose of this study aimed to design and construct a special PCM pallet for better temperature-control performance in the cold chain. The novel PCM pallet was also integrated with the standard pallet, cold storage container, and PCM pack, particularly suitable for the cold chain environment over the whole process from the cold product storage to transportation. A split PCM pallet and can were adopted to independently install at the bottom of the carriage. As such, the system was charged with the cooling thermal energy (CTE) using off-peak electricity at night. The specific procedure was as follows. The goods were first loaded onto the pallet, according to the required transportation of perishable food, while the PCM pack was then put into the pallet, and the forklift was finally inserted into the insulated truck for transportation. The CTE capacity was adjusted flexibly in this system, according to the actual needs of the transport goods, compared with only a limited CTE capacity in the traditional cold storage refrigerated vehicles. A performance test of temperature-control transport was also performed on a newly-developed platform for 100, 200, and 300kg PCM pallets. The results showed that the mean temperatures were 9.3 ℃, 6.9 ℃, and 6.7 ℃, respectively, while the temperature-control time reached 19.1, 42.2, and 65.3 h, respectively, in the three PCM pallets during the temperature-control stage without an air supply. Furthermore, the mean temperatures were 5.7 ℃, 4.6 ℃ and 3.3 ℃ when the fan was turned on, 3.6 ℃, 2.3 ℃ and 3.4 ℃ lower than that without an air supply. At the same time, the temperature-control time reached 21.5, 41.5, and 70.2 h, indicating all the same without an air supply. More importantly, the CTE capacity was flexibly controllable for the transportation time and required temperature range. Nevertheless, there was a seriously uneven temperature field in the 300kg PCM on the horizontal and upper layers of carriage without wind, where the temperature difference between sections reached up to 3.2 ℃. In addition, the mean temperature difference was reduced to less than 0.5 ℃ in the cross section, when opening the fan, 84.4% lower than before. Consequently, the absolute temperature in the 300 kg PCM plate can be expected to reduce by 52.0% for the insulated vehicle, compared with the traditional. The center of mass of the vehicle was also reduced by 47.3%, compared with the overhead PCM refrigerated vehicle. The finding can provide a sound reference for the application and optimized design in the PCM-based transportation equipment.