RFID Offers Promise for Perishable Supply Chain (Touchpoints by Andrew Jensen)

Our annual technology issue always presents a good chance to check out what’s new at the Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Arkansas.

The ITRI has one of the top Radio Frequency Identification labs in the world and one of its latest projects involved testing RFID applications in the perishable supply chain.

Many consumers — as much as a third or more — choose where to shop based on product freshness, and loss of perishables is the greatest source of shrinkage for grocers.

Tracking the perishable supply chain presents a number of challenges not found in other RFID applications. The most common and cheapest RFID tags are “passive,” meaning they only activate when they enter an electromagnetic field created by a tag reader.

In order to monitor perishables, data must be collected, which means semi-passive or active tags must be used. Semi-passive and active tags require their own power source and are therefore bulkier and more expensive. Semi-passive collect data while active tags can both collect and transmit data.

The most important data to collect when tracking perishables is temperature, and the ITRI ran its experiment with semi-passive tags on each box of a load of fruit shipped from South America to Arkansas in a temperature-controlled container.

Semi-passive tags can be set to record data at set intervals rather than continuously to preserve battery life.

The experiment found that just one pallet out of 22 maintained the container’s set point temperature and that the two pallets nearest the doors were the warmest.

For a load of fruit, that may mean ripening has accelerated and that product could be placed on the shelves first, discounted by the supplier or refused by the customer.

The case of fruit ripening is a quality, not a safety, issue. But the ITRI noted in its research paper that excessive temperatures for a load of shrimp could present risks and would make the data very valuable.

The configuration of cargo within a container affects airflow, and a subsequent test on vegetables shipped from the west coast to east coast over four days showed that clearly.

Pallets stacked on top maintained the target temperature, while those in the middle and on bottom were warmest, suggesting the cooled air wasn’t reaching the entire shipment.

All of this data shows tremendous promise for the technology to benefit suppliers, shippers and customers, but there are a number of obstacles.

The more complex RFID tags can cost $5 and more, making it necessary to recycle tags and find a universal way to do so. The current technology also requires manual starting and stopping of the tags, which is labor intensive and unsustainable in an environment with a large amount of tags.

There is also no standard communications among the RFID manufacturers. Large-scale adoption of the technology will be less likely if proprietary solutions dominate, the ITRI concluded.