RFID: The Code for The Future

Radio Frequency Identification or RFID reduces errors, costs and crime and improves customer service and sales levels. In the food supply chain, it is increasingly a legal requirement on livestock and good practice in food processing. For example, the large New Zealand dairy cooperative Fonterra has ordered 500,000 RFID tags to go on milk samples, giving more automated, accurate procedures.

This is something adopted earlier in Australia though on a smaller scale. Fonterra also uses an RFID handshake between pipe and milk storage to ensure that the right product is pumped into the right place and records are automatically fi led. RFID is increasingly used on conveyances in food and beverage manufacture for increased automation and error prevention.

One billion RFID enabled phones are in prospect before very long and they will be used throughout the supply chain for such things as route monitoring by security patrols and automatic data capture. Gas cylinders used in food preparation are already RFID tagged as are beer kegs. All this has been at the favourite frequency for RFID called High Frequency HF (13.56 MHz) and already familiar in food factories as cards and badges for secure access by staff.

The first rollout of RFID on wine bottles has taken place where the RFID tag not only replaces the barcode with something which can be read reliably and automatically, but also monitor temperature excesses. The so-called RFID time temperature recorders, TTR employ thin paper batteries that are safe enough to be eaten. A recent development from Power ID is a TTR label working at the UHF frequency band which gives it enough range to be automatically read in warehouses, trucks etc.

UHF tags are also put on pallets and cases of food and beverages under the mandates of major retailers. However, as with anti-theft tags before them, UHF tags, while a major benefit to the retailer, are a major expense to the manufacturer. The longer range of ultra high frequency or UHF RFID is very much a hit-and-miss affair with water, metal, blind spots and multiple reflections a major problem. This has meant that hidden cases of the difficult products like cans of soda cannot be reliably read in a pallet load and when reading individual items, there can be confusion as to which is being read.

If only HF RFID could work at longer range, with better multi-tag reading and less power hungry readers. If only the tags could be cheaper than UHF tags, instead of more expensive. Fortunately all these breakthroughs are just being announced, with great implications for the food and beverage industry.

The technology of HF RFID—over half of all RFID installed in the world today—is now taking a great leap forward. It includes newly possible increases in range of such tags of 50 to 500 percent, readers working off one tenth of the power so that button batteries, portability and even solar power are more practicable, and the ability to interrogate ten times as many tags at the same time, where this may be required.

Indeed, insensitivity to incoming radio interference is improved and danger of causing interference is reduced. Tags can now be interrogated even if they are touching. It has been shown how the silicon chip – the most expensive part of the tag – can be replaced with printed transistors at one tenth of the price and no lead, arsenic or other nasties.

Particles of only three nanometers in diameter of silver now create the HF tag antenna without need of much silver or high temperature for curing, which would otherwise mean expensive types of plastic fi lm if slow expensive processes were needed. In highest volume, the price of HF tags is set to tumble so they will be affordable even on individual manufactured items of food and beverage for improving supply chain efficiency, reducing counterfeiting and theft.

The exciting companies responsible for this now or in the near future include Kovio, Cambridge Resonant Technologies, Magellan, DAG System and NanoMas Technologies. Clearly there are great implications for the food and beverage industry in terms of increased consumer convenience and better merchandising such as downloading a reward when the phone is held near a tagged food package.

Policing customer returns and monitoring the reverse supply chain— including food recalls for safety reasons—can be conducted more rapidly and accurately. These technologies permit hidden cases and even cans to be monitored even when hidden in a pallet load of beverage cans. Some retailers will even allow the public to buy things with their phones and take them straight home without going to a checkout. Some food will program the microwave. Now that really is fast, safe food, from farm to fork.

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