Edgbaston Stadium and Levy have won RFID Project of the Year at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards for the Edgbaston RFID Smart Cup System, the scheme that puts a tag in every reusable cup at the Birmingham cricket ground. The ceremony was held on Wednesday 4 November 2026 at The HAC in Central London, presided over by the actor, comedian and writer Aurie Styla. Retail Technology Innovation Hub, the trade title that runs the awards, said it had received a record number of entries this year.
Levy, the catering operator at Edgbaston, picked up a second trophy the same evening in AI Innovation (UK), shared with Kappture. That is a separate category and a separate piece of work.
95.7% across a season, 98.79% on one day
The awards coverage carries a figure that had not been published before. Across the first full season, RTIH says, the system “achieved a 95.7% cup return rate, improved deposit integrity and generated significant labour and security savings”.
That sits next to the number in our report of August 2026, when Edgbaston recorded a 98.79% return rate. The two do not contradict each other and the system has not gone backwards. The 98.79% was one match day with 20,000 guests. The 95.7% covers the whole 2026 cricket season, fixture after fixture, including the Women’s T20 World Cup and Vitality Blast Finals Day.
Anyone who has run a deposit return operation knows which of those is the harder number to hold. A showcase day gets full cup stock, briefed staff and a single crowd. A season brings weather, short turnarounds between fixtures, very different crowd profiles and cups that leave the site altogether. Holding 95.7% across all of it is the figure to benchmark a tagged cup scheme against.
What is actually deployed
The platform is STAR, the cup tracking system from Belgian automation company Aucxis, and Edgbaston was its first UK deployment. Every reusable cup carries its own tag, so each cup is individually identifiable rather than simply counted. Fans drop cups into RFID collection points on the way out, the reader identifies what has come back, and the deposit refund is issued automatically, including when one person in a group carries several cups back at once. No app, no scanning, no queue.
The emphasis in the award citation is financial control rather than throughput. The legacy process refunded deposits largely on trust. RFID enabled validation means a refund is only released when a genuine deposit backed cup is read, which closes the obvious holes: cups brought in from outside the scheme, and the same cup presented more than once. RTIH reports cup losses and staffing requirements both down as a result.
Aucxis has still not published any hardware detail. Neither the operating frequency nor the reader models have been stated for this deployment. Schemes of this shape generally use UHF RAIN RFID in the 860 to 960 MHz band, because bulk reading a bin load of tagged cups in a single pass is not something the alternatives do well, but that is standard practice for the application rather than a confirmed specification for Edgbaston.
The rest of the field
Checkpoint Systems and JD Sports were highly commended for the retailer’s European RFID roll-out, which reached more than 400 UK and Ireland stores during 2025 and was targeting the remaining 680 European stores by October 2026, with ItemOptix providing real time inventory visibility and RFID tunnels going into the distribution centres. The retailer has since reported 98% shelf availability.
Also shortlisted were Lager 157 with ClarityRFID, whose three month Nordic pilot returned stock accuracy as high as 98 to 99.8%, and RADAR, which calls itself the only vertically integrated provider of overhead RFID and says it is deployed across more than 1,700 stores as of the third quarter of 2026. No judges’ comments specific to the RFID category were published.
Who did what
Our August coverage named Aucxis, Event Cup Solutions, Levy and Re-uz as the delivery partners. The STAR LinkedIn post about the award adds Kappture and Square, which read as the point of sale and payment side of the operation, although neither role has been confirmed and that post does not mention Re-uz. Aucxis and STAR’s own pages refuse automated access, the Event Cup Solutions news page would not load, and Edgbaston’s newsroom does not mention the award, so the division of labour stays as published in August rather than as inferred.
