LavanderCode, a Madrid software house that builds IT systems for industrial laundries, said in September 2026 that its LavanderTrace RFID traceability platform is running across five ELIS España laundry plants, giving the operator item-level tracking of the garments moving through them.
ELIS is the Spanish arm of Elis SA, the French textile, hygiene and facilities services group founded in 1883 and listed on Euronext Paris under the ticker ELI. Elis reported full-year 2025 revenue of 4,796.8 million euros, up 4.9 per cent year on year including 3.8 per cent organic growth, and employs around 54,000 people in 30 countries. It has traded in Spain for roughly 45 years and runs 39 industrial laundries there, serving hospitality, healthcare, social care, retail, industry and cleanroom customers.
What LavanderTrace claims to do
LavanderTrace is LavanderCode’s RFID traceability product for textile rental and laundry operators. According to the company’s own announcement, the deployment covers four points in the garment cycle:
- Identification: every garment carries a unique RFID tag, so each item can be recognised individually rather than as part of a bulk load.
- Reception and sorting: garments arriving at the plant are registered automatically as they pass through RFID reading arches, with no manual scanning step.
- Processing and washing: the movement of each item is logged at each stage of the wash process, which LavanderCode says prevents garments being lost or diverted.
- Despatch and delivery: the system checks that each garment goes back to the customer it came from, closing the loop on traceability.
LavanderCode frames the problem in the terms textile rental operators tend to use: garments going missing, no real-time visibility of where stock sits, and the logistics overhead of getting every item back to the right customer. Its other products include the Lavander 4.0 platform, RFID reading cabinets and arches, an LED-guided garment sorting system, handheld and PDA-based readers and clothing dispensing units. The company is based at Calle Lenguas 18 in Madrid and also sells into care homes and workwear providers.
What the announcement does not say
This is a vendor announcement rather than an independently audited case study, and the claims above are LavanderCode’s. It gives no operating frequency, no tag type or supplier, no garment volumes, no plant names and no deployment dates, so none of those should be inferred. It also publishes no measured result for shrinkage, throughput or sorting accuracy.
As general industry practice rather than a stated detail of this rollout, laundry RFID tags are built to survive hundreds of industrial wash, extraction and press cycles, and are usually sewn into a seam or heat-sealed to the fabric. Reading arches and cabinets are used because they read a full cage or trolley of garments in one pass instead of item by item, which is what makes RFID economic in a plant handling large daily volumes. In textile rental, the commercial case usually rests on knowing where stock is and cutting shrinkage, since every unreturned garment is a replacement cost against a fixed rental fee.
Spanish capacity keeps growing
Elis has been investing in Spanish capacity in parallel. In 2024 it opened Elis Cleanroom Granollers near Barcelona, its third cleanroom-garment laundry in Spain, a 6 million euro investment starting at 59,000 items a week with a second-phase target of 98,000 items a week. It also put 14 million euros into a site at Illescas to add capacity along the Madrid to Toledo corridor.
More coverage of RFID asset tracking and logistics deployments is available in our category archives.
Read more at https://lavandercode.es/elis-espana-implementa-lavandertrace-para-la-trazabilidad-de-prendas
