Event overview
Interest in the use of RFID in grocery retailing is ever present and growing, but so too are the questions about whether there can be a business case that the CFO would approve.
At our last Product [RF] ID Working Group meeting, click for recap, more than 30 retailers joined a discussion on the emerging use of RFID in grocery, including Albert Heijn, Auchan, Carrefour, Coles, Jumbo, Lidl, Mercadona, M&S, Target, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Walmart and Woolworths. Three retailers shared early experiences from trials and deployments, particularly in fresh meat. The discussion confirmed that RFID can work technically in demanding grocery environments. The bigger question is whether retailers can make the economics and operating model work at scale.
Item-level tagging promises extraordinary visibility: faster and more accurate stock counts, better date management and markdowns, improved availability, easier identification of products approaching expiry and potentially new ways of detecting and preventing loss. In a fun and engaging way for store associates. Yet RFID tag costs, source tagging and supplier integration, encoding at production, the complexity of fresh supply chains and the sheer number of small suppliers can quickly challenge the business case.
Other models are beginning to emerge such as the use of RFID in the floral category, then there is case and tray-level tagging in the supply chain that may offer much of the inventory benefit at lower cost. And then some retailers are applying RFID only to products made in-store, such as store produced bakery items, avoiding upstream supplier complexity altogether. Meanwhile, increasingly capable QR / 2D barcodes may deliver some of the same benefits at a fraction of the cost.
This working group meeting will explore both what retailers are doing today and what they can imagine doing tomorrow. Where does RFID genuinely outperform existing technologies? Which grocery categories and processes offer the strongest business case? Could one RFID investment unlock benefits across availability, waste, productivity and loss? Where should tagging take place? And what needs to change in costs, standards and supplier capability before RFID becomes mainstream in grocery?
We will hear from retailers from the working group already deploying or trialling different approaches and invite the group to discuss their thoughts on the retailers learnings, the most promising future use cases and share their updates.
If RFID is already on your roadmap—or you are trying to decide whether it should be—this is a meeting for you, and we look forward to you joining in the discussion. This meeting is for retailers, producers and academics only.
