Asda has finished fitting electronic shelf labels across the whole of its UK Express convenience estate, with more than 1.2 million labels running in 517 stores as of September 2026. Asda is one of the UK’s largest supermarket groups, and Asda Express is its small-format convenience chain, a mix of high street shops and forecourt stores. The programme cost GBP 7.5 million and puts an end to the weekly job of swapping over 120,000 paper price tickets by hand.
On the face of it that is a merchandising story rather than an RFID one. It is worth a second look. An electronic shelf label, or ESL, is a battery powered e-paper display with a radio on board, individually addressed from a central price system. An estate of 1.2 million of them is an estate of 1.2 million wireless endpoints on UK shelf edges, and on this particular label family there is an optional passive high frequency tag sitting alongside the radio.
What is actually on the shelf edge
The hardware comes from VusionGroup, the French listed retail digitalisation business formerly known as SES-imagotag, which says it serves more than 350 large retailer groups across Europe, Asia and North America. Asda has standardised on the 2.6 inch VUSION shelf edge label, one of the common sizes across the V100 and V300 series, so the model chosen sits in the mainstream of that range rather than at either extreme. Grocery Gazette reported better screen quality and readability as a factor in the choice.
Price data does not reach those labels over shop Wi-Fi. The VUSION family communicates on a proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol, bidirectional, using up to 11 channels, with radio coverage of roughly 25 metres from an in-store access point and 128-bit AES encryption with secure key exchange. Because the link is two way, a label confirms what it has been sent, which is how a retailer can be confident that the price on the shelf matches the price at the till. Each label also carries a blinking LED pick-to-light function, used for picking and for locating stock on a shelf.
Where NFC comes into it
That 2.4 GHz link is proprietary radio and not RFID in the sense most readers of this site use the word. The NFC option is a different matter. SES-imagotag labels can be ordered with an integrated passive NFC tag that complies with ISO 14443 and operates at 13.56 MHz, the standard HF RFID band. ISO 14443 is the four part international standard for proximity cards and their reader interface at that frequency, and it is the same air interface used by contactless bank cards and transit tickets, with a working range of a few centimetres.
Tap an NFC capable phone on a label that has the chip fitted and it redirects to https://nfc.ses-imagotag.com/<Label-ID>, so the tag resolves to that individual label’s identity rather than to a generic product page. Antenna position varies with label size, so the phone has to be lined up with the antenna rather than waved at the display in general. VusionGroup’s own product material pitches the shopper use case directly, describing labels that can be tapped or scanned to reach product reviews, nutritional scores, stock availability in nearby stores or alternative formats online.
One caveat matters here, and it is the honest way to report it. Neither Asda nor VusionGroup has stated publicly whether the NFC chip is populated in the specific 2.6 inch units Asda has deployed. The tag is a documented option on this label family, not a confirmed feature of this rollout. What the rollout does establish is the scale of the opportunity: a UK retailer specifying that option across an estate of this size would put an HF tag population in the millions onto shelf edges in a single programme. Further background on the technology sits in our NFC coverage.
What the labels do for the stores
The displays carry pricing, unit cost, weight and promotional information, and they also show ingredient and allergen information for customers, with expanded detail on bakery items where that has historically been awkward to print at the shelf edge. The operational case is the removal of manual repricing.
Matt Harrison, Director of Asda Express Central Operations, said in the September 2026 announcement: “By removing manual pricing tasks, we’re freeing up time for colleagues to focus on serving customers and keeping store standards high.” Roy Horgan, UK and Ireland CEO at VusionGroup, said the company was “proud to have reached this milestone with Asda” and expected to build on the partnership.
This is the end of a staged programme rather than a single push. An earlier phase announced on 3 October 2025 covered 250 Express stores at roughly 2,800 labels per store, more than 700,000 digital shelf displays in total. That phase followed a three month trial at Oxford Road in Manchester, with Castleford the first new-build Express to open with labels fitted from day one, and 20 further Express stores due to open before the end of 2025 with the labels in place at launch.
Who delivered it, and why the store count varies
Renovotec, a UK integrator specialising in rugged mobile computing and RF infrastructure, handled delivery and installation. HL Display supplied the rails and holders that physically carry the labels on shelves, baskets, hooks, chillers and freezers, an attachment supplier rather than a technology partner. Retail Technology Innovation Hub, reporting on 30 August 2026 from a LinkedIn post about the project, named a wider supplier list, adding Elecomm, MADIC UK and Evolve on infrastructure, with Daniel Pelissier as project lead.
That RTIH report puts the figure at more than 550 sites rather than 517, because it counts the Asda petrol station estate as well as the Express stores. The two numbers are counting different things rather than contradicting each other: 517 is the Express store figure in Asda’s own announcement. Anthony McCarron, Projects, Propositions and Communications Manager at Asda, described the work as a step change for customers and colleagues, delivered on time and on budget.
Cameras are the next layer
Asda is separately piloting shelf-edge availability cameras in five of its larger main-estate stores. The system identifies gaps, out-of-stocks, low inventory and misplaced products and alerts colleagues to replenish, with a wider rollout planned. That is the computer vision half of the VusionGroup stack, which alongside the labels themselves includes VusionCloud, Captana for computer vision and AI, Memory for data analytics, Engage for retail media and PDi digital signage. For an RFID audience the point is the direction of travel: shelf level identity and shelf level sensing are converging on the same infrastructure.
The wider UK picture
Asda is not alone. Waitrose announced a partnership with SOLUM in December 2025 to introduce electronic shelf labels nationwide, and Co-op has been replacing labels across 2,400 stores through 2026. Between them, UK grocery is quietly building one of the largest deployed populations of addressable, powered devices at the shelf edge anywhere in retail, with an HF tag option available on at least one of the major platforms.
Read more at https://corporate.asda.com/newsroom/2025/03/10/asda-rolls-out-new-electronic-shelf-label-across-express-stores
