Tuesday, 9am, Madrid
RAIN in Action 2026 opened this morning in Madrid, bringing retailers, brands, integrators and chipmakers together for three days of presentations, live demonstrations and workshops. It arrives at an unusual moment for the RAIN RFID industry: the first year-on-year fall in chip shipments it has had to explain.
The RAIN Alliance’s latest figures show 42.7 billion RAIN tag chips shipped in 2025, down from a record 52.8 billion in 2024.
A blip, says the Alliance
Ahead of the summit, rfidnews.co.uk put six questions to Aileen Ryan, CEO of the RAIN Alliance. Her assessment is that the decline is a blip, driven by semiconductor inventory cycles, tariffs and retail destocking, and that it should be read against roughly 50% growth over the past four years.
That view is broadly supported by the industry’s longer-term trajectory. The question now is whether the next wave of adoption arrives quickly enough to keep a blip from becoming a trend. Three themes from the interview are likely to decide it.
Grocery
Grocery has long been tipped as RAIN’s next big vertical, and the fit is genuine: traceability, waste reduction and food safety, with the US FDA’s FSMA 204 traceability rule adding regulatory pressure. But grocery will only follow the path apparel took if the whole chain commits. Suppliers, manufacturers, logistics operators and retailers all need to tag. A single retailer acting alone is a pilot, not a market.
Regulation versus ROI
Ryan is clear that the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) is a catalyst for adoption, not a substitute for return on investment. Organisations that deploy RFID purely for compliance have bought a cost. Those that layer use cases, starting with stock accuracy and loss prevention and adding DPP on top, have bought a return, with compliance included.
RAIN-enabled smartphones
The arrival of RAIN readers in smartphones could change who the end reader actually is. When every shopper carries a reader, tag encoding, tag quality and power levels stop being engineering details and become matters of consumer trust. Getting them wrong at scale risks damaging that trust in a way that would be difficult to repair.
Why Madrid matters
The value of an event like RAIN in Action lies in the cross-sector conversations it makes possible. This year ECR Retail Loss is running its RFID in Retail Innovation Summit alongside the main programme, putting retail loss prevention specialists in the same building as the technology supply chain. These are the conversations in which the next wave of adoption either gets organised or does not.
The figure to watch when 2026 shipment data is published: whether RAIN chip volumes return above 52.8 billion.
rfidnews.co.uk is reporting from RAIN in Action throughout the week. Readers attending the event are welcome to get in touch.
