The work aims to reveal the important position of pre-cooling in front-end cold chain logistics. From the perspective of pre-cooling external effects, the front-end cold chain logistics nodes were optimized through the cost synthesis model of maximizing the external effect and minimizing the costs of cold chain logistics. Meanwhile, the value of external effects of post-harvest pre-cooling of fruits was estimated by market value method, moreover, the specific process of optimization and calculation was explained by the example of litchi in Conghua. After the layout optimization of pre-cooling nodes, the total value of the external effects was 92 times that of the layout cost of the pre-cooling nodes, accounting for 1/5 of the total sales of litchi in the whole year. The extension of pre-cooling node can not only create economic value for itself, but also produce huge external effect. It plays an active role in regulating the contradiction of fruit and vegetable production and marketing, prolonging the supply period, stabilizing and increasing farmers' income, et al.