Tosca and Cabka launched the euro-size Tosca Circular Pallet (CP 1208) in April 2026, and across the whole launch announcement RFID gets exactly one sentence: “RFID integration further enhances traceability, asset management, and full supply chain visibility.” Six months later, when Tosca showcased the pallet at Fruit Attraction, the fruit and vegetable trade show held at IFEMA Madrid from 6 to 8 October 2026, the showcase release repeated that sentence word for word. For a pooled asset, where the identity effectively is the product, one sentence is a thin specification.
Tosca is a reusable packaging and pooling business serving food, beverage and fresh produce supply chains, which means its customers rent and return the assets rather than buying them outright. Cabka manufactures pallets and large containers from recycled plastic, and also runs a track and trace service of its own.
The rest of the product detail is generous. The CP 1208 has a 1200 x 800 mm euro-standard footprint for compatibility with euro-size handling equipment, “subject to the requirements of each installation” in the October wording. It is moulded from 100% recycled plastic, an “exclusive blend” in October and a “unique blend” in April, and is more than 4 kg lighter than a traditional wooden pallet. The skid edges are rounded rather than square to cut impact points during forklift handling, deck grooves lock Tosca’s reusable crates in place without strapping for double-stacked transport, and there are top-deck handles, anti-slip features and drainage holes. It is non-porous, splinter-free and easy to clean, unlike the wooden pallets it is pitched against, which need ISPM-15 heat treatment or fumigation under the international phytosanitary standard for wood packaging. The release sells “durability and modular repairability” as the route to a lower total cost of ownership, and names automated storage and retrieval systems as a target environment.
The regulatory framing is explicit. PPWR is the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, which has been directly applicable in all EU member states since 12 August 2026 and replaces the earlier Packaging Directive. It covers transport packaging, pallets included, and from 1 January 2030 at least 40% of certain transport packaging used in the EU must be reusable and part of a functioning reuse system. Laurent Le Mercier, EMEA President at Tosca, said in the April 2026 launch release: “With increasing automation, tighter regulations, and rising sustainability expectations across FMCG and retailers’ supply chains, the demands placed on pallets are evolving.”
What the one sentence leaves out
Set against that level of detail, the RFID line is conspicuous. The published material gives no frequency band, no air interface standard, no chip or inlay, no supplier, no tag count per pallet, no indication of where in the pallet a tag sits, no read range or read rate, no statement of whether tagging is standard or optional, and nothing on whether a tag survives the modular repair the cost case rests on. Plastech’s October 2026 coverage renders the line as “RFID integration is also available”, which hints at an option rather than a fitment, but that is the outlet’s paraphrase and not the release wording.
Cabka’s own track and trace page is no more specific. Read on 12 October 2026, it offers to “track assets using IoT, RFID, BLE or barcode technologies across key touchpoints”, with no band, standard or tag detail. BLE there is Bluetooth Low Energy, an active battery-powered beacon technology and a different proposition from a passive RFID tag, which draws its power from the reader’s field. The page presents them as interchangeable menu items, but they imply very different hardware, costs and service lives.
Band and standard are not pedantry
An operator cannot plan from “RFID integration”. The band and air interface decide which readers work, what dock-door infrastructure costs, how the identifier is encoded, and whether a pallet arriving at a customer site can be read on equipment that customer already owns. For a pooling fleet crossing many sites in many countries, that last point is the whole game. The market convention for returnable transport items in Europe has settled on one dominant approach, and most pooled crate and pallet programmes are built around it, but that is an industry norm and not a published specification for the CP 1208. Neither company has confirmed which band or standard this pallet uses. The RFID glossary covers the bands, air interface standards and encoding involved.
Moulding a transponder into recycled polymer is the hard part
This is the most technically interesting part of the story, and nobody has addressed it. An RFID antenna is tuned to resonate at a particular frequency, and that tuning depends on the electrical properties of whatever surrounds it. Change the material around the antenna and you shift that resonant point, which is called detuning: the tag is still there, but it absorbs less energy from the reader and its read range drops, sometimes to nothing.
Recycled feedstock is variable by nature. Composition, filler content, moisture and carbon black loading all shift from batch to batch, and all of them affect the dielectric behaviour of the plastic. A tag tuned on virgin resin can detune once embedded in recycled resin, and because the variation is not constant, nor is the detuning. One moulding run can read well and the next can read badly. The release even advertises that variability as a commercial virtue, noting that recycled content “reduces dependence on volatile input markets”. Solving the tuning problem across a 100% recycled blend is real engineering, and it is precisely the part nobody has described.
Modular repair versus the asset’s identity
The commercial case for the CP 1208 depends on repairability: damage a block or a component and you replace that part rather than scrapping the pallet. That raises an obvious question about the transponder. If the tag sits in the part that gets swapped, the asset either loses its identity or acquires a new one, and the pooling records that justify the whole reuse system break at that point. Nothing published about this pallet says where the tag sits or what the repair procedure does about it, which is the kind of detail that decides whether an asset tracking programme holds together over years of service.
Reading inside an automated warehouse
The release names automated storage and retrieval systems as a target environment. These are the crane-and-shuttle warehouses that move pallets without an operator, and they are among the harder radio environments in logistics: steel racking, dense stacks, pallets packed close enough that neighbouring tags shadow each other, and no human to re-present a load that failed to read. Tag placement and read rate decide whether tagging works there, and neither has been published.
If the tag carries the compliance evidence
PPWR does not treat a returned pallet as reuse by default. The asset has to operate inside a functioning reuse system, and transport packaging moving between sites of the same or related companies must be reusable and used within one. Extended Producer Responsibility, the principle that the producer carries the cost of a product’s end of life, follows the same logic. Per-asset identification is how a pooling operator shows that a system exists and that assets are circulating in it. If the sustainability story rests on that evidence, the tag is load-bearing rather than a bonus feature, and its specification stops being a product detail and becomes a compliance question.
The fair point is that a pooled, RFID-tagged pallet moulded from 100% recycled polymer is a genuinely interesting piece of engineering. Alex Masharov, CEO of Cabka, said at Fruit Attraction in October 2026: “Our contribution is to turn recycled plastics into durable transport products designed around customers’ operational needs.” None of that is in dispute. It is simply that as at October 2026 neither Tosca nor Cabka has published anything about the part that makes the tracking work. The information may well exist inside both businesses and just not be public, and a specification sheet would answer most of it in a paragraph.
