S1 Ep 10
The Rise of RFID in Grocery Retail
How the importance of RFID in grocery retail is growing.
Following rapid adoption in fashion and sports retailers, there is strong interest from supermarket retailers as to how RFID could help improve productivity, compliance and reduce food waste, especially in the fresh meat categories.
In this episode, Colin Peacock and Professor Adrian Beck explore the learnings from retailers on the learnings and results from their RFID trials in grocery - particularly in fresh meat.
Fresh meat is considered one of the most advantaged categories for RFID, in part because the technology can then be used to automatically alert staff to upcoming expiry dates.
Podcast summary
Colin Peacock and Professor Beck discuss RFID in grocery retail, focusing on RFID in fresh food can now deliver item-level visibility and better data accuracy.
The conversation highlights how improved read performance is making RFID more viable in “hostile” grocery environments, while also revealing errors that were previously hidden in inventory and expiry data.
They also flag the operational hurdles—especially source tagging across hundreds of suppliers—and outline why 2D barcodes may be a stepping stone, with RFID in fresh food and other technologies applied where they add the most value.
Cleaned transcript
Welcome and why this topic matters
COLIN:
Hello, and welcome to the ECR Retail Loss, Sell More and Lose Less podcast series.
My name is Colin Peacock, and I work with a community of experts and academics who share their latest research findings and best practices.
Every week or two, I’m joined by one of those experts to discuss the latest insights from our meetings, discussions, and research.
This week I’m joined by Professor Beck, and we’re looking at the role of RFID in grocery and the potential to reduce waste on fresh meat and improve productivity.
We had a meeting on RFID recently, looking at supermarkets, with over 100 people on the call—immensely popular and a huge level of interest.
We had a couple of retailers share tests, trials, and updates, and others shared where they’ve got to as well.
It seemed really rich in learnings.
What are your key notes and takeaways for retailers thinking about RFID in grocery retail?
ADRIAN:
It was an interesting session because we’re so used to hearing from apparel retailers, where they’ve been pushing forward and getting real benefits from investing in RFID.
It was interesting to hear from some big grocers now moving into this space, trying to understand how they can benefit.
RFID in grocery retail is becoming more technically viable
ADRIAN:
Traditionally, grocery has been seen as a no-go area.
There are issues with the types of products grocers stock that aren’t very RFID-friendly—lots of metal shelving, metal tins, and viscous fluids, which have been enemies of RFID working well.
And grocery is often low value, high volume, which makes cost and data accuracy challenging.
But what we heard was encouraging: those issues used to be a problem, but not anymore.
Very few people were saying they were having problems getting tags to read, even in what was considered a hostile environment for RFID.
It was good to hear how the technology has progressed to deal with those physics issues we used to talk about.
COLIN:
It was interesting that it not only works, but it’s starting to uncover inaccuracies that were previously hidden.
Things like the accuracy of expiry dates, what products were shipped or not shipped, and what was actually in the system versus in reality.
Using RFID in grocery retail to improve expiry accuracy and reduce waste
ADRIAN:
That’s an area where apparel isn’t too worried—apparel has seasons, but they’re not dealing with meat going off tomorrow.
For grocers, it’s a real potential win because they need to be sensitive to product going out of date or they can lose a lot of money.
RFID can offer major benefits by enabling better stock rotation and helping them understand shelf life more accurately.
We heard some great stories particularly around meat, which is a high value product for many grocers.
Managing that well is important, and there were strong case studies showing wins from investing in RFID, especially around fresh meat products.
COLIN:
Yes, it was fascinating.
The biggest operational hurdle: source tagging at scale
ADRIAN:
One note of caution came through strongly.
In apparel, you might have five or six suppliers, so you can start to impose a source-tagging strategy because there aren’t too many to deal with.
In grocery, you can have dozens—potentially hundreds—of suppliers coming into stores on a daily basis.
That makes it much harder to get a scalable, sustainable source-tagging strategy in place.
In many trials, tagging was happening inside the business.
And from apparel, we know you really need to get to source tagging for this to become a viable long-term strategy.
COLIN:
We did hear some people taking an easier route initially by focusing on store production items—items produced in the store—and putting an RFID label on them.
That doesn’t require source tagging, because you can label in the butchery area.
And in the UK, a lot of retailers don’t want to sell products beyond their use-by date, because there are huge fines for selling or presenting products for sale beyond expiry.
I hadn’t really thought about the point on the number of different local suppliers, especially in meat and protein.
Tagging complexity across grocery ranges
ADRIAN:
Another interesting point is how apparel has converged on a standard approach—often a loop tag attached to the garment—which works well for read rates.
In grocery, the product proposition is much more varied, and some retailers recognise they need different types of tags for different product types to make reads effective.
We’ve seen this elsewhere—Decathlon is an example of a retailer that spent a lot of time designing tags to work for particular types of products to enable accuracy.
So for grocery, it’s not only the challenge of source tagging, but potentially different tag types for different products and providers, which can get complicated.
That said, the value from the trials was clear: better product visibility, improved inventory accuracy, and more transparency.
In grocery, where margins are tight, that level of accuracy and transparency can make a real difference to profitability.
RFID in grocery retail outlook: 2D barcodes first, then targeted RFID
COLIN:
What’s your sense of where this goes?
Do you see a “sunny upland”, as Mr Boris Johnson would say?
What hoops do grocers have to go through to make it widespread like apparel, or will they never get there?
ADRIAN:
I’ve always been clear that the value of RFID is in the ID—the ability to identify and know something about specific products.
In grocery, I think we’ll see a transition where 2D barcodes are rolled out much more, because you can get the same information on a 2D barcode with less complication, even though it relies on line of sight.
That still gives a lot of value, especially once grocers integrate that data into existing systems, which is challenging itself.
Then, for certain ranges in stores, we’ll see the gradual use of the RF element, and maybe others like Bluetooth as another way to transmit the ID.
They’ll go on a similar journey, but probably faster than apparel, which took close to 20 years.
Grocery may move quicker because 2D is a stepping stone: they can get value, then select products where RF adds extra value and bring it in as they go.
COLIN:
We’ve already seen in apparel how retailers have augmented RFID with 2D in some use cases, like returns fraud.
So in grocery, RFID may augment 2D rather than the other way around.
Thank you for those thoughts—we’ll no doubt touch upon this again.
After years of promise, maybe we’re now seeing real progress on RFID beyond apparel.
Thank you, Adrian, and see you next time.
ADRIAN:
Cheers, Colin.
Bye bye.
COLIN:
Bye bye.
