What the tag actually is

Prada’s authenticity FAQ, which covers its whole range rather than these two lines specifically, says that on ready-to-wear the NFC tag is sewn onto the inside label or supplied on a separate card, and is usually not visible. Technically this is the short-range end of HF RFID: a passive transponder based on ISO/IEC 14443, operating at 13.56 MHz, with no battery, drawing all its power from the reader field, and with a working read range of a few centimetres. The reader is the customer’s own phone, which is the whole commercial point for a luxury house. There is no reader estate to buy.

Prada publishes none of the detail an RFID engineer would want. There is no public statement of the chip, the tag format, the memory layout or the inlay supplier, and nothing on whether the tags carry cryptographic authentication of their own or simply point at a record held on Aura. The RFID glossary covers NFC, HF and the ISO/IEC 14443 air interface if you need the terms.

From authentication to per-stage traceability

The Aura Blockchain Consortium is the shared ledger behind this, announced publicly in January 2022 by LVMH, Prada Group, Cartier owner Richemont and OTB Group to give competing luxury brands a common blockchain for product records instead of each building its own. Prada’s product page for the Navy Re-Wool shirt, listed at CAD 2,350, says the garment is certified through Aura without mentioning NFC at all.

The fullest account of what the tag now carries comes from Hypebeast on 8 October 2026 and the Japanese trade title Fashionsnap on 21 October 2026, which reports fibre origin, supplier and processing country for each stage, on the same model Prada already uses for Re-Nylon. US title The Impression describes the same thing: a tag that opens Aura, where the owner sees fibre origins, suppliers, processing locations and production stages alongside a blockchain-secured certificate of authenticity. All of that is a company claim relayed through brand-supplied press coverage. There is no Prada press release on the launch, nobody outside the company has verified the per-stage records, and a consumer-facing tap is not an audit.

What is actually being traced

Re-Cashmere uses cashmere residues from spinning plus offcuts from the Prada Group’s Torgiano knitwear facility in Umbria, separated by colour so no further dyeing is needed, then carded and spun in Italy. The raw cashmere is certified by the Sustainable Fibre Alliance, a non-profit scheme covering herding practice and rangeland management, and the recycled yarn carries Global Recycled Standard certification, the Textile Exchange standard that verifies recycled content and chain of custody. The result is 100 per cent recycled cashmere, used for men’s and women’s sweaters.

Re-Wool recovers defective fabric and cutting-room remnants from across Prada Group production, strips out non-wool components, sorts by colour, then wet-shreds and cards the material. It is 50 per cent virgin wool certified to the Responsible Wool Standard, Textile Exchange’s sheep welfare and land management scheme, plus 40 per cent recycled wool and 10 per cent recycled cashmere, with the recycled portion GRS certified, and it covers women’s trousers, jackets, skirts and dresses. Both lines are made in Italy by suppliers in Tuscany and Umbria, and volumes are limited because the feedstock is existing factory surplus.

Those certificates are why the traceability claim is more than marketing. A GRS or RWS claim only holds if the chain of custody behind it is documented, so the per-stage supplier and processing data has to exist internally whether or not it is ever exposed on a tag. Prada’s advantage is vertical integration: when the offcuts come out of your own plant at Torgiano, you already know their provenance.

Why this is a DPP built early

The EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, in force since July 2024, is the framework that will require Digital Product Passports: a digital record reachable from a data carrier on the product itself, holding material composition, origin, and repair and recycling information. Textiles are one of the first priority groups, but the detail sits in delegated acts still being drafted, so apparel requirements are not expected to apply before 2027 at the earliest. Prada is not meeting a rule here, it is building the data model in advance, which is a far easier position than retrofitting one later.

The hard part of a DPP has never been the carrier. A 13.56 MHz inlay in a care label is a solved problem, as our NFC coverage shows week after week. The hard part is collecting supplier and processing records at every upstream stage and keeping them attached to a specific physical unit. One caveat for anyone reading this as a template: Aura is a private consortium chain, not an interoperable public registry, so whatever the EU finally specifies as the DPP data model, a conversion job is waiting at the end of this. More in our Digital Product Passports section.

The privacy answer, which is unusually direct

Prada’s FAQ states that the tag stores no personal data, that each change of owner is recorded on Aura as a Digital Certificate of Ownership, and that the customer can permanently deactivate the tag. A published, owner-controlled kill option is rare in a sector that has argued about item-level tagging and post-purchase readability for twenty years. It also creates a tension nobody has resolved: deactivating the tag ends the resale provenance chain that is half the point of fitting it, and a passport the owner can switch off is awkward if regulation later requires the carrier to stay readable for the product’s whole life.

Prada itself has said almost nothing. Its Milan headquarters told the German trade title TextilWirtschaft, in a paywalled piece on 15 October 2026, that a second life for the material should be read “not as a compromise, but as an evolution”. That is the only direct quote available, and it is second-hand.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

What a liaison is, and what it is not

Liaison status is a real seat at the table, and the word is doing enough work here to be worth unpacking. Under the ISO/IEC Directives Part 1, a category A liaison organisation may propose new work items, nominate experts to working groups and hold convenor or project leader roles in them. ISO’s own guidance for committee liaisons is blunt about the limit: “A-liaisons do not have voting rights. However, they can submit comments during the voting process and are strongly encouraged to do so.” Those comments get the same treatment as comments from member bodies, which is the part that matters in practice.

Getting in is not automatic either. The committee must pass a resolution, at a meeting or by ballot, with a two-thirds majority of participating members voting to approve. That is the mechanism behind Aileen Ryan’s reference to support from voting members. Ryan, named RAIN Alliance President and CEO in October 2022, said in the announcement:

“The Digital Product Passport is reshaping the global economy by prioritizing transparency, sustainability and efficient recycling throughout the entire lifecycle of a product. This level of global interoperability can only be achieved through cross-industry collaboration, and so we were honored to be accepted as a Liaison to ISO/IEC JTC 5 with such significant support from voting members. Our acceptance underscores our commitment to supporting organizations in their use of RAIN tags to optimize recycling, reuse, and resale - and in turn promote a truly circular economy.”

The announcement does not say which category the Alliance holds. It already has an equivalent position at CEN/CENELEC JTC 24, accepted in early 2025.

Why there are two DPP committees

CEN/CLC/JTC 24, “Digital Product Passport - Framework and System”, is the European committee, created to answer the European Commission’s standardisation request M/604 in support of the DPP provisions of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. CEN and CENELEC are the European bodies for general and electrotechnical standards respectively, and JTC 24’s secretariat is held by DIN, the German national standards body.

ISO/IEC JTC 5 is the international counterpart, described by CEN-CENELEC as the international mirror committee to JTC 24. DIN and DKE, the German electrotechnical commission, announced its launch on 20 April 2026, and DIN holds this secretariat too. ISO’s committee listing names Adrian von Muehlenen as chair until the end of 2031, with 32 participating and 16 observing national members. Its scope covers the DPP system framework and the wider DPP ecosystem rather than sector-specific standards, which stay with existing ISO and IEC committees. Work was to begin in the third quarter of 2026, with first results expected from 2028 and the inaugural plenary scheduled for Berlin in September 2026.

JTC 5 is built as a network rather than a silo, stitching together work that already exists elsewhere: ISO/TC 154, which covers data elements and documents used in commerce and industry, established an internal liaison with it on 9 August 2026.

Where RAIN already stands as an approved carrier

JTC 24 has produced eight European standards for the DPP, covering data exchange protocols (EN 18216), unique identifiers (EN 18219), data carriers (EN 18220), data storage and persistence (EN 18221), APIs (EN 18222), system interoperability (EN 18223), access rights and information security (EN 18239) and data authentication and integrity (EN 18246). Six were cited in the Official Journal by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736, adopted on 14 July 2026, which gives a presumption of conformity with Articles 10 and 11 of the ESPR for the parts they cover. EN 18239 and EN 18246, the security and authentication pair, were not among the six.

EN 18220:2026 was published in May 2026 and listed by CEN-CENELEC as “Digital product passport - Data carriers”. It sets requirements for the physical-to-digital link across optical 2D codes, RFID tags and NFC chips, covering symbology, format, error correction, encoding methods, print and production quality, and durability. The Alliance’s claim that RAIN RFID is one of the approved carriers is sound, and the limit matters: being in the standard is permission, not procurement. Which carrier a product must actually bear is set in the delegated act for its product group, so inclusion in EN 18220 guarantees a tag vendor nothing commercially on its own.

The drafting drew pointed industry comment on the RFID side. In a letter dated 5 September 2025 to the JTC 24 secretariat at DIN, AIM Global and AIM Europe argued that rewritable RFID and NFC carriers create a data integrity risk if a passport link can be overwritten, and recommended that write protection be made mandatory.

The regulatory clock

The ESPR is Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, which entered into force on 18 July 2024 and repealed the old Ecodesign Directive 2009/125/EC. It creates the DPP as a legal instrument but imposes nothing by itself. Obligations arrive product group by product group through delegated acts, and the Commission’s first Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Working Plan, adopted on 16 April 2025, set the running order: textiles with a focus on apparel, furniture, tyres, mattresses, iron and steel, and aluminium. The years in that plan are indicative targets for adopting delegated acts, not compliance dates.

The one hard date on the board is not an ESPR date at all. Under Article 77 of the EU Battery Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, electric vehicle batteries, light means of transport batteries and industrial batteries above 2 kWh placed on the EU market from 18 February 2027 must carry a battery passport. That is the first mandatory product passport in EU law, and the deployment that will show whether the plumbing works before the ESPR groups arrive.

The technical case, and the cost problem

The argument for a tag over a printed code at end of life is a good one and does not need overselling. A RAIN tag can be read in bulk, through packaging and through contamination, without being presented to a scanner. That is exactly the situation at a sorting facility or a textile recycler, where nobody will orient a filthy label towards a camera. Tags can also be built to survive repeated industrial laundering, or moulded into a tyre and still return an identifier years later. Susanne Guth-Orlowski, RAIN Alliance DPP Specialist, made the durability point in the announcement:

“Billions of products already rely on RAIN technology to deliver enhanced operations and support data-led decision-making across sectors including aviation, automotive, healthcare, retail, logistics and countless more. Each of these sectors benefit from the durable longevity RAIN tags provide as they can withstand heavy usage and harsh conditions while consistently delivering reliable data tracking throughout a product’s entire lifecycle. Furthermore, with RAIN reader capability soon to be available in smartphones, RAIN adoption will become accessible and affordable to consumers. This makes RAIN technology scalable to meet the needs of a global Digital Product Passport while bridging the gap between industry application and universal adoption.”

Against that sits an awkward economic fact. A QR code conforming to ISO/IEC 18004 costs effectively nothing to apply, because it is ink on a label that was being printed anyway. A tag is a chip, an antenna, an inlay, a conversion step and a verification step, and on a low-margin garment that difference is the whole argument. The groups where a tag’s economics already work, tyres, furniture, mattresses and industrial batteries, sit high up the working plan, while apparel at volume remains the hard case. Nor is this a market immune to cost pressure: RAIN Alliance reported on 2 April 2026 that four of its leading members shipped 42.7 billion RAIN tag chips in 2025, down from the record 52.8 billion of 2024. The realistic outcome for most product groups is both carriers, a 2D code for the consumer and a tag where automation or end-of-life recovery pays for it.

The smartphone question needs care

The claim that RAIN reader capability is “soon to be available in smartphones” is the most load-bearing line in the announcement, and it deserves stating precisely. As of October 2026 there is no shipping consumer handset with a built-in RAIN reader, and no handset maker has announced one with a date.

What exists is a path. RAIN Alliance published a joint position with Qualcomm, Impinj and Decathlon on 27 August 2024 setting out the case for RAIN readers in handsets, in which Qualcomm said initial rollouts would focus on enterprise devices with consumer devices to follow, giving no consumer date. In November 2025 Qualcomm’s Dragonwing Q-6690 was presented as the first enterprise mobile processor with a fully integrated UHF RAIN reader, supporting ISO/IEC 18000-63 and aimed at handhelds, tablets and payment terminals rather than consumer phones. Enterprise handsets with built-in UHF reading are already on sale: Zebra’s EM45, launched in January 2025, reads up to 20 UHF tags per second at a maximum range of 1.2 m, which is a useful instrument for a shop assistant and a long way from a shopper scanning a jumper in a changing room. Enterprise integration is real and shipping. Consumer integration is intended and unscheduled, and anyone building a DPP programme on the assumption that shoppers will read tags with their own phones is planning against a capability that does not yet exist.

What to watch next

Three things will show whether this liaison matters. Whether EN 18239 and EN 18246 get cited in the Official Journal, because without the security and authentication layer the data model is incomplete and the write protection question AIM raised stays open. What JTC 5 puts on its work programme once the Berlin plenary has settled its structure, with first deliverables not expected before 2028. And, most consequential for tag makers, whether the delegated acts for iron and steel, textiles and tyres name specific carriers or leave the choice to industry. That is where approval in a standard turns into orders, or does not.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

On 31 January 2026, Motor1 wrote up a TikTok video. Jay Pichardo, a car salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Manchester, New Hampshire, who posts as @jay_sellsbenz, had filmed the sidewall of a Michelin Pilot Sport 4S and circled the RFID marking in red. “Michelin, I have questions,” he said. “Why is there an RFID tag on a tire? Explain that to me.” The clip had passed 17,600 views when JT Wilson covered it, and Carscoops, SlashGear and BGR followed.

Nothing new had happened. Michelin, the French tyre maker, had been building that tag into production tyres for about a decade. What was new was that a non-specialist audience noticed, and that many of them assumed it was there to watch them. The comments read as free market research: guesses at pressure monitoring, logistics, recall tracking and litigation records, and one landing on counterfeit verification with “So u know it’s real”.

Ten years of tagging, almost entirely unnoticed

The technique predates Michelin’s programme. Tire Review reported on 30 July 2014 that Goodyear brought RFID to NASCAR in 2000, and that the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship pioneered pit-lane tyre scanning to police spec-tyre allocation. Most of those tags came from Hana Technologies, a maker of embeddable tyre tags with roots in microelectronics and watch production; chief executive John Erdmann told RFID Journal on 13 March 2025 that Hana tags have run in NASCAR since 2006 and MotoGP since 2016. The ambition is old: Michelin hired Hana RFID in 2012 for bus tyres at the London Olympics, and Kumho Tire, the South Korean maker, said in 2013 it planned to tag all 35 million tyres it built annually.

Volume came with trucks. Ralph Dimenna, then chief operating officer of Michelin Americas Truck Tires, told the American Trucking Associations Technology and Maintenance Council meeting in Nashville in February 2017: “Michelin is the first manufacturer to integrate RFID into its full commercial truck tire portfolio.” Heavy Duty Trucking reported on 28 February 2017 that installation began in July 2016, and that around 98% of Michelin’s global commercial truck output was already built with an embedded chip.

Why it took a decade: heat, flex and steel

A tyre is close to the worst home you can give a passive UHF RFID tag. These are battery-free tags read in the 860 to 960 MHz band, branded RAIN RFID by the alliance that promotes them, and the tyre brief is brutal: survive vulcanisation, a million kilometres of flexing and retreading, transmit through rubber loaded with steel, and last the tyre’s life, because the tag can never be swapped out. Our RFID glossary covers the terminology and the UHF hub the wider context.

Michelin’s answer is its fourth-generation tag, described by Claire Swedberg for RFID Journal on 1 August 2024. A 37 millimetre coiled antenna sits horizontally across the sidewall, embedded in the rubber layers where mechanical constraint reaches the chip least, twisting and bending to absorb thermal and mechanical stress. Earlier generations needed a Chemloc adhesive coating to bond the tag to the rubber; Gen 4 drops it, and its tyre-compatible material survives recycling. “The integration inside the tire is much easier,” said Laurent Couturier, Michelin’s RFID system designer.

The less-told story is that the universal tag keeps losing to the bespoke one. Hana builds the Direct Attach tag, a small PCB wired to an antenna, and the Linkless Tag, developed at Michelin’s request from 2017, in which a spring is the antenna and the chip floats at its centre. Linkless is the better idea on paper, but RFID Journal reported in March 2025 that “long-term industry experience finds that customized implementations often provided better performance, leading tire manufacturers to continue to use the Direct Attached tag”.

Who actually makes the tags

To be precise about supply: in May 2024 Murata, the Japanese components maker, licensed the Gen 4 design from Michelin for mass production from January 2025. RFID Journal reported that Michelin “is also working with Beontag and Hana RFID to produce more tire-specified RFID tags to support the demand that is coming”, and Beontag announced its own Michelin partnership on 12 June 2024. Hana has supplied over 250 million tyre tags, and its branding and business strategist Val Peters offers a line any RF engineer will respect: “we never heard about an electronic failure due to breakage of the tag. It’s just never happened.” Michelin’s own volume, per Couturier in August 2024, was around 50 million tyres, with passenger cars worldwide the next target at roughly 100 million. Consumer outlets reporting that 100 million as a fitted total have read a target as an achievement.

2026 is the year the rest of the industry caught up

One manufacturer tagging tyres is a logistics project; an industry agreeing how to read each other’s tags is a platform. ISO 20910 gave the sector a common numbering scheme for tyre tags in 2019, and Michelin cites it alongside ISO 20909; see our standards coverage. Above it sits the Global Data Service Organization for Tires and Automotive Components, or GDSO, a Belgian non-profit founded in early 2022 by Michelin, Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear and Pirelli to standardise tyre data and resolve each tyre’s SGTIN-96 identifier.

Its timeline is the strongest evidence that something changed. GDSO registered as a liaison organisation with CEN-CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24 on Digital Product Passports on 1 October 2025, and Toyo Tires joined as a full member in September 2025, its traceability programme covered here on 18 December 2025. On 12 February 2026 GDSO signed a memorandum of understanding with the RAIN Alliance, whose Tyres Masterclass of 23 April 2026 handles education, and on 8 April 2026 it launched a North American lifecycle services ecosystem for services, governance and pilots. Then on 12 August 2026 Linglong Tire became the first Chinese manufacturer to take full membership, which is when a European founders’ club starts to look like a world standard.

Continental, the German tyre and automotive supplier, announced the Conti Hybrid HT 5 trailer tyre on 16 February 2026, completing its Conti Hybrid Generation 5 family, and said plainly that “All tires are also equipped with RFID sensors”. That is a commercial trailer line, not a passenger-car rollout, and fellow GDSO founders Bridgestone and Pirelli publish no volumes at all. Accounts of the first carmaker mandate conflict, with RFID Journal putting Volvo’s in the late 2010s and Impinj at 2021. Either way it is vehicle tracking of a quietly consequential kind.

The regulation nobody can date yet

Published timings for the rules conflict wildly. Motor1 said digital product passports would be required for tyres from 2027; Beontag’s June 2024 release said the requirement “will comes into effect for tires from 2028-2030”. As of 20 October 2026, tyres are a priority product group in the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation working plan for 2025 to 2030, but no delegated act for tyres exists or has been proposed, so no date is legally fixed. The years conflict because adoption and application differ: trackers expect adoption around 2027 plus a transition of at least eighteen months, putting real obligations at 2029 at the earliest, and those are estimates, not law. The plumbing runs ahead of the rules, since the EU’s central DPP registry went live on 20 July 2026 and we set out what those rules mean for RFID on 19 August 2026.

Not location tracking, but not nothing either

Back to the salesman with the phone. Michelin’s published position, on its RFID page as fetched on 20 October 2026, is clear and technically accurate. The tag holds “the tyre’s unique identifier” in SGTIN-96 format, compliant with ISO 20909 and ISO 20910. A standard read returns the commercial designation, meaning size, brand and range, while “any other information related to the RFID of the tyre is subject to the prior permission of the tyre user”. The identifier, the company says, “can’t give access to personal data without the consent of the person concerned” and is “comparable to a tyre-specific serial number”. That is true: no GPS, no clock, no record of where the tyre has been.

Now the half the industry says less often. The identifier is unique and permanent, because once embedded, as Michelin states, “the tyre identifier can’t be changed and the tag can’t be deactivated without damaging the tyre”. And the read range is not a few centimetres: RFID Journal put it at “on average, the tags can be read at distances from two or three to five meters”. So anyone standing near a parked car with a handheld can collect four permanent unique serials tied to that vehicle, without touching it and without the owner knowing. That is not location tracking. It is also not nothing, because a persistent unique identifier readable at a distance is the raw material from which location histories get built.

Michelin’s safeguard is real but narrow. Asked who can read the tag, it answers: “Anyone who has a scanner, the associated API and is authorised by the consumer to collect information about them.” The protection sits in the API and in contract, not in the tyre, and the owner cannot verify who has read their serials, switch the tag off, or audit whether those access controls are honoured.

The sector’s failure is not the engineering, which is excellent, nor the privacy design, which is defensible. It is that ten years and tens of millions of tagged tyres went by without anyone explaining this to the people buying the tyres. So when the explanation reached a mass audience in January 2026, it was framed not by Michelin, GDSO or the RAIN Alliance, but by a thirty second video asking why there is a chip in the thing you drive on.

So is this the breakthrough?

On the evidence, yes, with one caveat. The engineering argument is settled: Gen 4 solved embedding, durability through retreading and recyclability, and Hana reports no electronic failures from breakage across more than 250 million tags. The shared data layer, which turns tagged tyres into an industry capability rather than one maker’s private asset, visibly accelerated across 2025 and 2026, and European regulation will eventually make tyre identification compulsory, even if nobody can yet date it.

The caveat is the one Pichardo stumbled into. Fleets need no persuading, but passenger cars are the 100 million unit prize, and those tyres are bought by people who have just learned from TikTok, rather than from the companies responsible, that there is an unremovable, remotely readable serial number in something they own. Peters told RFID Journal in March 2025: “We’ve come such a long way as an industry in making [tire tracking] possible, but at the end of the day we’re still at the beginning.” That looks right. What slows this down now is not tag physics, steel interference or read range. It is consumer trust, and the sector has ten years of silence to make up for.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Most of our readers will meet the Digital Product Passport as a deadline rather than an opportunity, which is exactly the framing Nanna Ingemann Dalsgaard thinks will cost them money. As VP of Strategic Intelligence at SML Group she spends her time on the gap between what the regulation requires and what the infrastructure could do, and she is unusually willing to say where the industry is getting ahead of its evidence. We put six questions to her on what item-level RFID does and does not solve for DPP, where the margin actually sits, who owns the accuracy of a passport when a supplier gets it wrong, and whether consumers will ever care. Her answers are published in full and unedited.

Nanna Ingemann Dalsgaard

Vice President, Strategic Intelligence, at SML Group. SML supplies RFID tags, labels, brand identification and Digital Product Passport carriers to retailers and brand owners worldwide, working across RFID, NFC, QR and digital product identity.

The DPP conversation has moved from “where is this product” to “what is it made of, how was it used, and where does it go next”. For a brand that already runs item-level RFID, how much of the DPP problem is already solved, and how much is genuinely new work?

The first thing to be clear about is that RFID and Digital Product Passports are not the same thing. They solve different problems, but they can complement each other extremely well.

RFID has primarily been deployed to give brands visibility of physical products across factories, distribution centres and stores, supporting inventory accuracy, operational efficiency and increasingly traceability. A DPP has a different purpose: it connects a product to a much richer set of information about what it is, what it is made from, how it should be used, repaired or recycled, and potentially what happens to it throughout its lifecycle.

So a brand with mature item-level RFID has not already “solved DPP”, but it has solved an important part of the foundation, which is creating and managing digital identities for physical products at enormous scale.

The genuinely new work is largely around the data behind that identity, bringing together information that today may sit across PLM, ERP, suppliers, sustainability systems and other sources; establishing governance and access rights; and making that information available in the interoperable structure required by DPP.

We, at SML, see RFID and DPP as complementary rather than competing technologies. The opportunity is to build on the item-level identification infrastructure many brands already have and extend it into a broader connected-product architecture.

That is where it becomes more interesting than compliance. Once a trusted digital identity can connect a physical product with reliable information throughout its lifecycle, the same foundation can support supply chain efficiency, traceability, circularity, authentication, resale and new consumer experiences. RFID gives many brands a significant head start. DPP expands what that digital identity can ultimately do.

The Thursday DPP track opens with a session titled “From Mandate to Margin”, which is a bolder claim than most DPP talk. Where is the margin actually, and is there a brand you can point to that has found it rather than just complied?

I think the phrase “from mandate to margin” is important, because the margin does not come from the passport itself. It comes from what you build on top of the product identity and the data behind it.

If DPP is treated purely as a regulatory project, it will primarily be a cost of compliance. But once that digital connection to the product is in place, it opens up several value pools. A connected product can become a direct post-purchase touchpoint with the consumer. It can enable services such as repair, take-back and resale, support authentication and increase confidence in secondary markets. And over time, the data generated across those interactions can help brands understand how products actually move through their lifecycle.

We are already seeing early examples. Green Cotton Group in Denmark has connected Digital Product Passports with its RE-LOVED recommerce model, where published results show that 50% of resale buyers were new customers and 86% of orders combine new and second-hand products.

Other projects involving brands are also exploring how DPP infrastructure can make resale more efficient and potentially allow brands to participate economically in a product’s second and third life. However, I think we need to be careful not to overstate where the industry is today. We have early signals of emerging business models and commercial use cases; we do not yet have years of evidence showing a universal “DPP margin”.

At SML, we encourage brands to think about how compliance establishes the requirement, but it should not define the ambition. If you are going to create the product identity and data infrastructure anyway, design it so it can support future value creation as well. The real shift is from thinking about the product relationship ending at checkout to potentially creating value throughout the product’s lifecycle.

Most of our readers will meet DPP first as a compliance deadline rather than an opportunity. What is the most expensive mistake a brand can make in the next eighteen months while treating it that way?

I think the most expensive mistake would be to build DPP as a standalone compliance project that you later have to rebuild as business infrastructure.

I completely understand why brands initially say, “just make me compliant”. DPP is complex. It touches data that may sit across PLM, ERP, suppliers, sustainability systems and other parts of the organisation, and the regulatory requirements are still developing. That is why I think the focus right now should be on understanding what you already have before deciding exactly what you need to build.

Start with a focused pilot. Understand where your data sits, what is missing, how reliable it is, how products are identified today and how the different systems connect. That gives you a much clearer picture of your starting point and what will actually be required.

This is also where industry experienced solution providers can help reduce complexity. At SML, for example, we approach DPP across the physical and digital layers, from product identification and data carriers through to the digital platform and the connections into a brand’s existing ecosystem.

While you are doing the work, think beyond the immediate compliance requirement. The same product identity and data infrastructure may eventually support richer consumer engagement, authentication, repair and resale, circular services and better lifecycle insight.

So my advice would be to not wait for every regulatory detail to be final. Start now by understanding your data, what you have, where it sits, what is missing and how reliable it is. You do not need all the answers yet, but you need to understand your starting point. The expensive mistake is not starting small. It is starting with something you know you most likely will have to replace.

RFID gives you a serialised identity at item level, which looks like the obvious carrier for a DPP. What are the honest limitations? Where would you tell a brand that a QR code or something else is the better answer?

RFID is extremely powerful for creating a serialised identity and capturing products at scale across factories, distribution centres and stores. The limitation today is at the consumer interface. RFID, which is widely used for item-level identification in apparel, cannot generally be read by today’s end consumers’ smartphones. So while RFID can provide the identity and support the product throughout the supply chain, consumers currently need another way to access the DPP.

That is where QR codes have a very obvious advantage. They are inexpensive, familiar to consumers and can be accessed directly with a smartphone camera. If the primary requirement is simply to give a consumer easy access to a Digital Product Passport, QR may therefore be the most practical answer to begin with.

NFC provides another option. It offers a tap-based consumer experience and is supported by modern smartphones, but it comes with different cost and implementation considerations. For many brands, the answer may ultimately be a combination. RAIN RFID can support high-volume identification and operational use cases throughout the supply chain, while QR or NFC provides an accessible consumer interface to the same underlying digital identity and information.

At SML we work across RFID, NFC, QR and digital product identity, so the objective should not be to push a particular carrier. It should be to design the identification architecture that makes sense for the product and the use cases. The carrier is the doorway. The real value sits in the identity, the data and the services you connect behind it.

A DPP is only as good as the data behind it, and apparel supply chains are not famous for clean data. Who in the chain actually owns the accuracy of a product passport, and what happens when a supplier gets it wrong?

Ultimately, the regulatory responsibility sits with the relevant economic operator, it cannot simply be outsourced to a supplier or technology provider. But the data itself will inevitably come from many different actors across the supply chain.

A mill may provide information about materials, a manufacturer about production, and certification or testing data may come from another party altogether. So data accuracy is not just about collecting information. You need to know where it came from, who provided it and ideally what evidence sits behind it. Suppliers will get things wrong, data will change, certificates will expire and information will sometimes be incomplete. That means brands need processes for validation, correction and governance rather than assuming that everything entering the passport is automatically correct.

For me, this is one of the biggest lessons for brands starting their DPP journey is, do not wait for perfect data before you start. Use the time you have now to understand where the gaps are, establish ownership and start improving data quality, rather than waiting until the requirements become mandatory. Clean data is something you build, not something you are handed.

“Clean data is something you build, not something you are handed.”

Five years out, does the DPP become invisible infrastructure that nobody talks about, or a thing consumers genuinely interact with? Your honest view, not the optimistic one.

Honestly, I think it will be both, but most consumers will probably never talk about a “Digital Product Passport”.

What consumers may interact with is what brands and retailers choose to build around the infrastructure. If the experience stops at presenting the information required for compliance, I think consumer engagement will be relatively limited. People may access it when they need specific information, but there is not necessarily a reason to keep coming back.

The opportunity is that the digital connection to the product does not have to stop there. The experience can evolve throughout the life of the product. A consumer scanning a sweater when they buy it in May could see one experience, while scanning the same sweater in November could provide something different, a new service, a campaign, a styling suggestion, a loyalty benefit or another reason to engage with the brand. That is where I think it becomes really interesting. A physical product can become an ongoing touchpoint between a brand and its customer rather than the relationship largely ending at the point of sale.

DPP is in my view part of that broader connected-product opportunity. Regulation may drive the infrastructure and accelerate adoption, but brands still have to create a reason for consumers to engage with it. So five years from now, I do not think consumers will care about DPP itself. They will care about what it allows them to do.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

SML connects more than 20 billion products for over 600 brands, which makes Lesley Suen one of the few people who can say what actually breaks at that volume rather than what breaks in a pilot. Speaking at the RAIN in Action Summit in Madrid, she holds an unusual dual role: VP of Product and Innovation, and General Manager for Greater China, so she sees both the roadmap and the factory floor it has to survive. We put six questions to her on exception management at billions of items, embedding a tag that survives the life of a garment, why Chinese and European programmes start from opposite ends, and whether a twelve-month estate-wide rollout is honest. Her answers are published in full and unedited.

Lesley Suen

VP of Product and Innovation, and General Manager for Greater China, at SML. SML supplies RFID tags, labels and brand identification to retailers and brand owners worldwide, including its InfuseRFID embedded garment tag and carriers for Digital Product Passports.

You are speaking at RAIN in Action as VP of Product and Innovation and as General Manager for Greater China, which is an unusual combination. What does the product roadmap look like from a Greater China vantage point that it would not look like from Europe or the US?

Greater China gives me a slightly different perspective because I see both the product strategy and what actually happens at the point of production. In Europe and the US, the RFID conversation has historically been driven more by the retailer, inventory accuracy, omnichannel, loss prevention and increasingly Digital Product Passports. In Greater China, you are much closer to where the product is actually made, identified and serialised. So I tend to look at the roadmap starting further upstream. How do we establish the right identity at source? How do we make sure the tag, the product and the data are correctly associated? How do we validate that before the product leaves the factory?

Manufacturers are also dealing with shorter lead times, smaller production runs and much more product variation. That means capabilities such as on-demand encoding and printing, source verification and automated validation become increasingly important. I also think that upstream perspective becomes even more relevant as the industry moves towards DPP and broader product traceability. The quality of the data downstream ultimately depends on how well you establish the identity of the product at the beginning.

SML connects more than 20 billion products for over 600 brands. At that volume, what fails that would never show up in a pilot? I am interested in the problems that only appear at scale, because most of our readers are planning deployments and have never seen one at that size.

The biggest difference at scale is that you stop managing the normal cases and start managing the exceptions. A pilot may involve a few hundred SKUs, one environment and a relatively controlled process. At scale, you have thousands of suppliers, factories, product types and production scenarios. You start seeing duplicate identities, incorrect SKU-to-serial associations, encoding errors, substitutions on the production line, rework, cancelled orders and products moving between factories. Individually, each of those exceptions looks small. But when you are dealing with billions of items, even a very low error rate becomes a very large operational problem.

That is why I think RFID at scale is as much a data-quality and process-governance challenge as it is an RF challenge. The tag has to work, of course. But more importantly, you need confidence that the digital identity being created genuinely belongs to the physical product it is attached to. That is one of the areas we are increasingly focused on, moving beyond simply supplying a tag towards helping establish a trusted product identity at source.

“The biggest difference at scale is that you stop managing the normal cases and start managing the exceptions.”

InfuseRFID embeds a washable tag into the garment itself rather than attaching a label. What did you have to solve to make a tag survive the life of a garment, and where does it still struggle?

Embedding RFID into a garment changes the engineering problem quite significantly. With a conventional hangtag or label, you have much more control over the construction and placement. Once you integrate RFID into the garment itself, you have to consider the complete lifecycle, manufacturing processes, heat, pressure, washing, drying, chemicals, repeated mechanical stress and, importantly, how the tag interacts with different fabrics and garment constructions. You also cannot solve durability at the expense of the consumer experience. It still needs to feel like part of the garment rather than a piece of technology that has been added to it.

The challenge is therefore finding the right balance between RF performance, durability, size, softness and manufacturability. I would also not say there is one embedded solution that works universally. Different materials and product categories behave differently, so testing and application engineering remain extremely important. What is exciting is that as the technology becomes smaller and more durable, the number of products where permanent digital identity becomes practical continues to expand.

The Thursday track at RAIN in Action includes a panel called “The Tag That Stays and the Tag That Leaves Cleanly”. Those are genuinely competing requirements: circularity wants a tag that detaches for recycling, and traceability wants one that never leaves. Which way do you think the industry settles, and what does SML build for in the meantime?

I actually think both will exist. The important distinction is between the identity of the product and the physical carrier of that identity. Traceability requires the identity to persist, but it does not necessarily mean that the same physical RFID tag has to remain attached forever. For some use cases, rental, authentication, industrial laundry or certain circular business models, a permanently embedded identity makes a lot of sense. For others, particularly where recycling or material separation is important, the industry may deliberately design parts of the identifier to be removable.

That is why I do not think SML should bet on a single physical format. We support everything from hangtags and adhesive labels through care labels and embedded RFID, as well as QR and NFC carriers for Digital Product Passports. Our approach is to make the product identity persistent while giving the brand flexibility over which physical carrier stays and which one leaves. Over time, I think we will also see much more deliberate design-for-circularity in the tag itself, rather than treating sustainability and RFID performance as separate engineering questions.

You have led item-level RFID rollouts for retailers across APAC. What do European retailers consistently get wrong that Asian retailers do not, and the other way round?

I would not frame it as one region getting RFID right and another getting it wrong. The starting point is often different because the economics, supply chains and RFID ecosystems are different. In Europe and North America, RFID adoption has traditionally been driven from the store, with inventory accuracy, stock visibility, omnichannel fulfilment and labour efficiency forming a large part of the business case.

In China, there are a few additional dynamics. First, China has long been a major production hub for RFID tags and labels, so there is already a relatively mature ecosystem around the technology. As a result, some Chinese retailers and brand owners are comfortable looking at RFID across the full supply chain from the beginning, rather than viewing it purely as a store technology.

Second, the labour economics can be quite different. In some Asian markets, where labour costs are lower than in Europe or North America, the business case for replacing manual activity in a store may not be as compelling on its own. A retailer may compare the recurring cost of tagging every item with simply adding a few more people. So the value proposition often has to be broader. The discussion becomes: can RFID improve efficiency across manufacturing, distribution and retail? Can it improve shipment accuracy, traceability and inventory visibility throughout the supply chain?

For domestic premium brands in China, we also see greater emphasis on brand protection and grey-market diversion. They may want to understand not only whether an item is in stock, but where that specific item was produced, where it was intended to be sold and where it ultimately appeared.

So I think one of the differences is that some Chinese brands start with a more end-to-end view of item identity, whereas many European and North American programmes historically started with store inventory accuracy and expanded upstream later. Ultimately, though, those approaches are converging. Once a brand has a reliable unique identity for every product, the same infrastructure can support inventory, supply-chain efficiency, traceability, brand protection and increasingly consumer-facing applications.

If a retailer told you they wanted item-level RFID live across their whole estate within twelve months, what would you tell them honestly about whether that is possible?

Sure, twelve months can absolutely be possible. But I would first want to understand what twelve-month success actually means for that retailer. The answer depends on the scale of the programme: how many items they produce, how many SKUs they manage, how many suppliers and factories are involved, the complexity of their retail supply chain and the number and format of their stores.

It also depends on the objective. Does “live” simply mean that every item is RFID-tagged? Does it mean RFID is operational in every store? Or does it mean the retailer expects to be generating reliable analytics and measurable business outcomes within twelve months? Those are very different milestones.

If the objective is clear and the supply chain is relatively straightforward, twelve months is very achievable. For a more complex retailer, I would normally break the programme into stages: establish source tagging and identity first, make sure the data is accurate, integrate it into the relevant systems and then scale the operational use cases. I would say the timeline has to be defined against the retailer’s scale, complexity and, most importantly, what they expect RFID to deliver at the end of those twelve months.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The RAIN Alliance is the global industry association for RAIN RFID, the battery-free UHF RFID technology that works in the 860 MHz to 960 MHz band and lets one reader identify hundreds of individually serialised items per second without line of sight. (The RFID glossary covers the terminology used here.) Ryan, who announced on the same day that she would be stepping down from the president and chief executive role, used the keynote to argue for treating RAIN RFID as plumbing rather than as a product.

“What I’m trying to represent on this slide is the concept of the RAIN technology infrastructure as a trusted item-level data platform. Get the data out, and everything else is potentially almost straightforward.”

“We defend the infrastructure”

The harder-edged part of the keynote was about who protects the conditions the technology depends on. Ryan put the Alliance’s membership at “over 200 member companies all around the world”, and framed that number as a negotiating position rather than a marketing statistic.

“If a small number of small companies went to a regulator to discuss a spectrum issue, the likelihood of them being listened to is pretty small. But if two hundred member companies, large and small, can go together and speak with one clear voice, now we have the opportunity to be heard.”

The same gap applies when policymakers write law without knowing the technology exists. “They probably don’t know anything about this technology. They probably don’t know that this technology can help them, either in the implementation of the law or in testing compliance against it.” Her summary of the job was blunt: “We defend the infrastructure. The standards, the spectrum, the regulatory environment. And that’s what enables this community to make the impact.” Then an admission you rarely hear from a stage: that this work “is costly and time-consuming”, that a large share of membership fees goes on it every year, and that “in my opinion, we need to be spending more”. For a live example of why spectrum defence is not an abstraction, see our explainer on what NextNav’s 900 MHz plan would mean for RAIN RFID worldwide.

Eight awards, six collected in person

Ryan called the awards “my favourite part of the whole event”. Eight were presented, six collected on stage. The lifetime achievement award went to Decathlon’s RFID and traceability leader, Herve d’Halluin, who Ryan said “has led probably the single biggest retail deployment on the planet” and who has also served several years on the Alliance’s board of directors. Decathlon has applied a RAIN tag to every product it sells since 2019. His acceptance speech was about collective action rather than technology.

“Some of you guys are individuals and some are producers, but within this group, we manage to find some commonalities. And when we decide to do something, we go there and we go there together, and that’s where we get some success.”

The other awards recognised work that is almost invisible from outside the Alliance: representation to the European Commission on digital product passports, chairing the Asia Pacific advisory council, government affairs and spectrum defence, the RAIN Communication Interface simulator and the push to get RAIN support into smartphone operating systems, and encoding. On that last one, Ryan made the point that matters most to anyone starting a deployment: “If you get the encoding wrong, everything else is wrong too.”

Tageos: 42.7 billion tags, and 0.5 per cent of the opportunity

Matthieu Picon, co-founder and chief executive of Tageos, took the “next 100 billion tags” slot. Tageos is a French RFID inlay and label manufacturer based in Montpellier, with plants in Asia and the United States, best known for paper-based constructions that strip plastic and adhesive out of the tag. It ships to 49 countries and sells only through partners.

Picon was unusually honest about a flat year. RAIN Alliance members shipped 42.7 billion UHF tag chips in 2025, short of expectations, which he put down to “very challenging international and commercial tensions”; he expects 2026 to recover “in the range of fifty billion”. Set against that, his estimate of the headroom was the figure worth writing down.

“We estimate only 0.5 per cent of RAIN potentially connected items are today connected.”

Four forces will close that gap, he said: regulation, with digital product passports and food traceability rules both demanding “accessible and trustworthy product information”; the economics of visibility; automation, because “labour costs are increasing” while “workforce availability is decreasing”; and customer experience, from self-checkout to product authentication. The AI argument was the one he pressed hardest, and it was a warning rather than a pitch.

“We need to understand where the items are, when they move, real-time data. Otherwise it will just be guessing, and the outcome will be certainly disappointing. So AI will have to rely on the physical layers we are providing.”

Inditex: from a price tag that kept falling off to 5,000 readers at the door

Ivan Escudero, head of RFID at Inditex, gave the deployment history. Inditex is the Spanish fashion group behind Zara, Massimo Dutti and Bershka, and has run RAIN RFID at item level for well over a decade. He opened on the business problem, not the technology: Inditex shop floors carry deliberately low quantities, often “one per size”, with the bulk of inventory in a stockroom next door. “The combination with the high traffic that we are having in the store is difficult to manage. So it is a very challenging environment that we need to solve with some technology.”

The first attempt put the tag in the price ticket. “We felt uncomfortable having it there because it was falling a lot and was not so accurate,” Escudero said. Inditex moved to a reusable hard tag instead, encoded per article in the distribution centre through RFID tunnels, with the algorithms written in house; he thanked Sensormatic and Checkpoint for their part in that. What followed in store was stocktake that is “very quick and very accurate”, replenishment driven off the sales floor, size availability checked while the customer waits, and a tool he described as “like WhatsApp, giving a message to someone in the stockroom to take the garment and give it to the customer”. Flagships of more than 4,000 square metres, laid out by ambiance rather than category, have pushed Inditex into locating articles automatically using fixed anchors.

The headline figure concerned loss prevention. Inditex has spent years trying to retire the detachable hard tag, which slows the till in stores seeing “more than 10,000 people a day”, in favour of RAIN tags built into the garment and readers at the entrance. Early trials went badly, with readers interfering with each other, “but now we have installed more than 5,000 RFID readers in all our stores at the entrance, and we are using RFID technology for anti-theft”. Because the system knows which item walked out, the alarm is informative rather than merely loud: stock is adjusted the moment it fires, and if sales do not subsequently appear against that item, “we assume that this was a theft”, with an app showing each store the value lost.

Escudero listed five requirements the replacement had to meet. It must not constrain the garment’s design, it must cost roughly what a hard tag costs, it must be quick to reactivate, it must be secure enough for detection, and it must be as durable as the tag it replaces. The answer was to stop treating the tag as one thing in one place: “Some garments have one, some garments have two. There is one in the brand label, another in the colour label. There is in every part of the garment.” He credited Avery Dennison with that development work and said implementation is complete across four of the group’s brands. The result he cared about was simpler than any of it: “we are very comfortable having no queues in the store”.

Closing the loop: what recycling actually needs from a tag

The session closed with a panel, “Closing the Loop: RAIN in Action Across Retail, Recycling and the Green Transition”, moderated by Dr Susanne Guth-Orlowski, the RAIN Alliance’s digital product passport specialist. A digital product passport is the EU requirement that a product carry a data carrier linking to structured information about what it contains, where it came from and how it should be handled at end of life; we have covered what the EU DPP Registry rules mean for RFID separately.

Dan McGrath, JD Group head of customer operations at JD Sports, the UK-headquartered sports fashion retailer, described a rollout measured in months: “It’s been a 14-month journey for us, and we’ve had a massive acceleration programme in terms of global adoption of RFID.” JD took 1,000 directly managed stores live in that window, and 2,700 across the wider group, work the retailer has since described as the end of phase one. What the data is for reaches past stock accuracy: “it’s very much about the transfer of ownership of that product from a factory to a brand, to also the retailer, but then also to the end consumer”. That chain of custody feeds ESG reporting, resale and authentication in a market where “there are a lot of fake goods”.

Hans Petter Hübert, director of strategic initiatives at Kezzler, the Norwegian traceability software company running digital product passport pilots inside the EU’s CIRPASS-2 project, made the carrier argument plainly. Kezzler is carrier agnostic as a data management provider, but “if you look at the core of the DPP requirement, it’s really to embed products with a data carrier. We want to follow the product from creation to end of life. And there’s only one technology that can support that at scale today.” The bottleneck, he added, is not the radio: “It is a data management challenge. And no matter what sector you’re in, you will have data scattered around in various systems and in various companies.” Tags that survive a garment’s whole life without contaminating the recycling stream already exist and are “probably too costly for many”, but the extra cost “at some point in the future will be worth it”.

The most useful contribution came from Gabriel Gomez, technical advisor at EuRIC, the European Recycling Industries’ Confederation, where he leads the mechanical tyre recycling branch. Recyclers have no stake in which technology wins; they care about throughput and contamination.

“For the case of tyres, we are very hopeful for RFID, in the sense that it is a solution that shows itself. Also, it’s not entirely geometry dependent, which is another one of the requirements. We’re talking about people who are handling thousands of articles per minute.”

His statement of the industry’s core problem was the clearest expression of the circularity case anyone made all morning: “The breaking point for the tyre recycling industry, and generally for the recycling industry and for the waste management industry, is really to know, once something enters the waste stream, what to do with it, and that comes with better sorting. If we have a tag that says this sort of thing, this and that, I can decide, I am going to put it this or there.” On the data volume that implies, he was blunt: “The amount of data that we are going to be generating is not something that we can handle manually. We’re going to need some support, some artificial support.”

Pressed on what “does not disturb the process” means in practice, Gomez was concrete. Quality thresholds differ by waste stream, so “I can give you 20 different answers”, but today a tag is harmless because “we just shred it”; the risk arrives when a recyclate has to meet a specification and the tag has pushed its metal content up. He also reported learning at the previous day’s tyre workshop, “less than 24 hours ago”, that tags can carry temperature and pressure sensing. Recycling plants lose time and material to fires started by batteries in the waste stream, and active sensing of those parameters “would be a game changer”. Guth-Orlowski took that as the argument for the event itself, noting how often a supply chain this large only discovers such things by sitting in the same room.

Ten cents, and a wash standard that does not exist yet

Asked what new requirements end users will place on RAIN tags, McGrath went straight at durability and price. It “comes down to cost”: “Woven into a care label, or we’re going to heat seal for a trainer, you’re probably looking at around 10 cents a tag, and you then, as a CFO of the brand, factor that into the amount of product that you produce every year.” Durability, when Guth-Orlowski asked him to define it, turned out to mean something the industry does not currently specify at all.

“We have care labels on the product that says 40 degrees or hand wash. But if you then got a tag as part of that care label, does that tag standard actually cover that? How many times can I wash it before the tag degrades and can’t be read anymore? As a brand, you need to make a decision on not just a tag standard, but a wear standard for that tag.”

His concern was not the first purchase but the next one. Brands “are going to spend a significant amount of money, that needs to be the right decision for a good few years. Not, oh, we’ve got this new tag standard now, and this new tag standard, then it’s this forever perpetual cycle of replacing tags.” A tag expected to live in a product for that product’s whole life, feed a digital product passport and still read correctly on a sorting line is a materially different specification from one that only has to survive a season on a shop floor. Nobody on the stage claimed it exists today. More from the sector in our retail RFID coverage and on the RAIN in Action summit page.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

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.

Every RFID conference, showcase and trade show we know about is listed in the RFID News events calendar.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

RAIN tag chip shipments fell from a record 52.8 billion in 2024 to 42.7 billion in 2025, the first decline the sector has had to explain. Ahead of RAIN in Action in Madrid, we put six questions to the head of the RAIN Alliance on whether that was a blip or a reset, why grocery is being named as the next inflexion, whether the EU Digital Product Passport deadline has overtaken ROI as the reason anyone deploys, and what she thinks actually unlocks the next phase.

Aileen Ryan

President and CEO of the RAIN Alliance. The Alliance is the industry body behind RAIN RFID, the UHF standard used for item level tagging across retail, logistics and healthcare, and it publishes the annual tag chip shipment figures the sector measures itself by.

The honest state of the industry. 2024 was a record year at 52.8 billion tag chips shipped, then 2025 corrected hard to 42.7 billion. From where you sit, was that a blip, a reset, or the industry growing up, and where is RAIN really at as we head into 2027?

You’re right that the 2025 figure represents a decline from the record heights of 2024, but this makes sense when viewed in the context of wider economic conditions. Shipments last year were faced with semiconductor inventory cycles and wider market turbulence caused by global tariffs, with retail destocking adding further pressure.

Despite the blip of 2025, the RAIN RFID market has grown around 50% over the past four years, so the longer-term picture remains one of growth. As we head into 2027, we’re also seeing the emergence of new potential growth drivers, with broader mandates in retail as RAIN RFID expands into new categories such as beauty and cosmetics, notable new mandates emerging in logistics, and early momentum in grocery, a sector with enormous long-term potential. RAIN-enabled smartphones in particular look set to open the technology to new consumer and field-based applications, with the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP) regulation making the case for the item-level visibility provided by data carriers such as RAIN being more relevant than ever.

Why this summit, why now? Amsterdam sold out, you have brought RAIN in Action to Madrid and ECR Retail Loss has co-located its RFID in Retail Innovation Summit with the event. What does that pairing say about where RAIN adoption actually is in 2026?

Madrid is an ideal host city, combining world-class logistics infrastructure with a strong retail and fashion ecosystem, including the headquarters of some of the world’s largest apparel retailers. As a key gateway between Europe and Latin America, it is an accessible location that makes it easy for the industries driving RAIN adoption to come together.

Enabling the ECR Retail Loss ‘2026 RFID in Retail Innovation Summit’ to co-locate with RAIN in Action felt like a natural fit, reflecting both the widespread adoption of RAIN technology within retail and the strong relationship we have built with the group over the past two years through shared areas of interest and collaboration. The evolution of its usage within the industry is also a prime example of how RAIN technology is moving from infrastructure to impact, as deployments move along the maturity scale. The mix of organisations attending and speaking at both events also points to a market moving towards broader ecosystem integration, with retailers, brands, logistics operators, reader providers, software companies and integrators coming together. The co-location also makes it easier for attendees to engage with both communities during a single trip, creating valuable opportunities for knowledge sharing and industry collaboration.

As far as what it means for RAIN adoption in 2026, both within and beyond retail, we’re seeing deployment applications diversify. Maturity still varies by market, sector and organisation, but we’re seeing how usage can be integrated into broader systems, scaled and connected across different operating environments to drive the maximum benefit of the item-level visibility that RAIN provides. This is especially true as businesses turn to technologies such as AI, with RAIN data forming the backbone of these systems by providing the accurate, real-time insights needed to deliver meaningful outcomes and deeper business intelligence.

The chipmakers are pointing at food and grocery as the next inflexion, especially in retail. Do you buy it, and what has to be true for grocery to go the way apparel did?

Food and grocery is certainly one of the sectors where we’re seeing more and more products tagged with RAIN. The technology addresses several existing challenges at once, including traceability, food safety, inventory accuracy, waste reduction and operational efficiency. Demand is also strengthened by increasing regulation, with requirements such as the FDA’s FSMA 204 increasing the need for accurate, accessible traceability data, which RAIN-enabled intelligent labels can support.

For grocery to follow apparel's adoption path at scale, the use of RAIN RFID needs to extend across the wider ecosystem. Consistent adoption by suppliers, manufacturers, logistics operators and retailers would allow data to follow products throughout the supply chain, combining RAIN data with cloud platforms, temperature sensors and predictive analytics to help identify spoilage risks earlier, reduce waste and enable more proactive safety management. Continued RAIN innovation is enabling retailers to extend item-level tagging into new departments without changing store workflows, making that ecosystem-wide data flow feasible across the cold chain. For example, protein products can now be tagged thanks to inlays engineered for high-moisture, dense, sub-zero environments.

The regulation clock. Digital Product Passports are coming on an EU timetable whether the industry is ready or not, and you have put a DPP specialist on your own staff. Is regulation now a bigger driver of RAIN adoption than ROI?

While regulation is a catalyst for adoption, it is not replacing ROI. DPP requirements are certainly creating urgency, particularly in sectors such as textiles and apparel, but RAIN already has countless established commercial use cases across multiple sectors.

I’d say it’s more that DPP is adding a new regulatory and circularity driver for RAIN deployments, with the same infrastructure able to create operational value beyond compliance. For instance, product data created for traceability can be more broadly leveraged across supply chains and internal business operations for loss prevention, predictive maintenance and inventory control to name just a few applications.

We also know that RAIN can evolve into a strategic financial instrument, far more than just a single use-case. As outlined in our recently published DPP Evolution Model, adoption progresses from supporting brand integrity, recommerce and fraud reduction to enabling new sources of value through ecosystem-wide data sharing and collaboration. By integrating RAIN data into core operating models, organisations can unlock the full benefits of circularity, create new revenue opportunities, and support the shift towards service-based business models such as rental, repair and subscription services.

ROI is often demonstrated with a single initial use case, but we’re now seeing ROI extended as end users layer use cases on top of one another to make the most of their deployment investment. As each new use case is deployed, returns continue to grow. For instance, by the time DPP requirements come into force, the investment has already been justified through operational and commercial gains, making compliance an additional benefit rather than the primary driver of adoption.

“While regulation is a catalyst for adoption, it is not replacing ROI.”

Your definition of success. When the last session in Madrid ends, what has to have happened for you to call it a success? Not attendance numbers, but what changes in the industry because those three days happened.

As deployments expand, interoperability will only become more important and RAIN in Action is a great opportunity to bring brands, solution providers, technology partners and policymakers together and foster the collaboration to make this happen.

Some of the most valuable insights emerge when organisations recognise that the trusted RAIN data infrastructure and methodologies used in one area of their business can also solve wider challenges by learning about usage in seemingly unrelated industries. For example, the systems used to authenticate medicine can also help protect consumers from counterfeit luxury goods, while the infrastructure supporting cold-chain compliance for perishable products can equally ensure vaccines, medicines and blood products remain safe and effective.

Cross-sector learning, information sharing, and relationship-building are therefore critical outcomes of the event. By bringing together such diverse perspectives around a common trusted data platform, RAIN in Action can help the community move beyond discussions of technology and focus on the tangible impact that RAIN infrastructure delivers across industries.

Anything needed for the next RAIN breakthrough. Is there anything still holding RAIN adoption back that nobody says on stage?

The biggest impact on RAIN adoption in the coming years will be much discussed at RAIN in Action, which is the rollout of RAIN-enabled consumer smartphones.

In the near future, every shopper will have access to a smartphone capable of reading item-level tags, meaning the entire in-store experience will change. This will enable them to locate and compare products and get the same personalised in-store experience as they do online, as well as have a record of their own possessions at home, accessible from their smartphone, each entry having its own verifiable identity, warranty position and service history.

However, for end users to trust and rely on these systems, the industry must get the fundamentals right the first time, from globally unique encoding and appropriate power levels and duty cycles, to selecting tags that meet the required quality standards for each deployment. These ‘best practice’ factors are critical to ensuring consistent, reliable performance at scale and engendering end user trust. Supporting this is a key role of the RAIN Alliance through work such as training courses and manufacturing quality guidance.

There isn’t necessarily anything holding this back that wouldn’t be said on stage, but there are certainly conversations that the RAIN Alliance smartphones workgroups are having behind the scenes that are advancing forwards implementation.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

NFC is the short-range, 13.56 MHz HF flavour of RFID that every modern smartphone can read without any extra hardware, which is what makes it the default choice for consumer-facing product authentication. The company says it builds both the hardware and the software, using radio frequency alone to certify that a product is unique, and that the approach scales from a few hundred pieces a year to millions. Everything below is drawn from Autentico’s own product page as of September 2026, and the company publishes no independent test results, so treat the claims as vendor statements rather than verified performance.

The label is made smart before it reaches the bottling line

The most practical idea in the system is also the least glamorous one. Rather than asking a producer to redesign packaging or bolt a tag applicator onto an existing line, Autentico asks the customer to post in their existing reels of adhesive labels. The company runs them through what it calls an Insert Label Machine, which places a tag into each label, and sends the reels back. The labels then go through the same labelling head they always did. The company says the customer does not have to change their production process at all, and that it can handle any type of paper adhesive label reel.

Autentico calls the result an “etichetta parlante”, a talking label, built around what it names a DNA Tag: the idea being that the product speaks for itself rather than relying on a certificate in a drawer somewhere. For a small winery or a single-estate oil producer, avoiding a capital purchase and a line change is often the difference between doing a traceability project and shelving one.

Wine, oil, shoes and the awkward case of metal

The applications the company lists map onto the sectors where Italian provenance carries the biggest price premium. On wine bottles the tag sits inside the adhesive label, protected from handling and from the wet, cold conditions of a chiller but still readable through the paper. On olive oil the argument is about substantiating a specific claim: organic certification, or a particular pressing method, tied to the individual bottle rather than to a batch code. On shoes, Autentico says artisanal production can be protected and the process automated to the point of recording photographs of the manufacturing steps, so the buyer can see the shoes being made.

Metal boxes get their own entry, and the company is right to flag it as a special case. Metal detunes an HF antenna and can kill a read outright, so tagging metal products means selecting a tag built with a ferrite layer or an on-metal construction rather than reaching for a standard inlay. Autentico says tagging metal requires care both in choosing the correct tag and in managing the stored data.

The named customers indicate the end of the market being targeted. Cantina Santadi is a co-operative winery founded in 1960 in the Sulcis region of south west Sardinia, with around 200 member growers farming over 650 hectares, and is widely regarded as the benchmark producer of Carignano del Sulcis. Dal Forno Romano is a Valpolicella estate at Cellore d’Illasi in Veneto, making wine under that name since 1983 and treated by collectors as a reference point for Amarone. Also listed are Colle Massari, where Autentico says it applies and reads HF NFC tags on wooden crates including non-standard sizes, the citrus grower Arance Campanella, the pasta producer Amandafood, Sterylab, and unnamed high-end electronics manufacturers.

Reading the map, not just the tag

The geolocation piece is what separates this from a simple authenticity check. Autentico says that when a tag is read, the platform records the product’s position in real time, and that producers can view georeferenced reads through a web back end where they also manage product cards and distributors. That turns an anti-counterfeiting tool into a distribution-control tool: if bottles allocated to one national distributor keep being tapped in a different country, the brand owner has evidence of parallel trade rather than a suspicion. For premium drinks and footwear brands, grey market leakage is frequently a larger and more constant financial problem than outright forgery.

What an NFC tag can and cannot prove

It is worth being precise about what consumer tap-to-verify demonstrates, because the marketing around it is often looser than the engineering. A tag that simply returns a static serial number can be read by anyone with a phone and written to a blank tag, so a plain UID proves very little on its own. Robust schemes use cryptographic authentication in the chip, the best known approach being the secure unique NFC message, where the tag computes a fresh message authentication code on every tap using a key that never leaves the silicon, so a URL replayed from a cloned tag fails verification at the server.

Autentico’s page does not name a chip, a standard or an authentication method, so there is no way to tell from it which of these approaches is in use, and readers evaluating the system should ask. One clue cuts both ways: the company says Autentico NFC can identify an original product with no internet connection. Offline verification is genuinely useful in a cellar or a warehouse with poor signal, but it means the check is being made inside the app rather than against a server, which is a meaningfully different security model and one that needs care in how keys and revocation are handled.

Why this is being sold in Italy first

The commercial backdrop is severe. Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farming association, put the damage from counterfeit and imitation Italian food at around 42 billion euros in figures reported in June 2026, of which roughly 40 billion relates to Italian-sounding food produced in the United States and about 2 billion to outright counterfeits of Italian products. Olive oil and wine are perennial targets precisely because origin is the product.

Regulation is heading the same way. Under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the 2025 to 2030 working plan gives 2027 as the indicative year for adopting the ecodesign measure covering textiles, apparel and footwear, with Digital Product Passport obligations following roughly 18 months after a delegated act enters into force. Producers already carrying a unique, item-level digital identity on each product will start that work from a better position than those who are not. Autentico also sells a companion product it calls Autentico CHAIN for distribution using RFID, along with HF and UHF tunnels, handheld and tablet readers and UHF gates. More on tagging at the pack and item level is collected in the smart packaging and NFC sections.

Read more at https://prodottoautentico.it/anticontraffazione-vino-moda-olio-nfc/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The group’s stated aim is to “accelerate the market adoption of sensor-enabled RAIN RFID and establish it as a scalable technology for high-value industrial applications”. In practice that means documenting where sensing tags already work, identifying what is holding deployments back, sharing good practice and pushing for interoperability, so that a sensing tag from one supplier behaves predictably in front of another supplier’s reader.

What a battery-free sensor tag actually is

RAIN RFID is the passive UHF air interface built on EPC Gen2, standardised as ISO/IEC 18000-63. The tag has no power source of its own. It harvests energy from the reader’s field, wakes up, and backscatters a reply by modulating how much of that field it reflects. Sensing versions add a measurement path to the same arrangement. Some tag ICs carry an on-chip sensor whose reading is written into tag memory and pulled out with the standard command set, including the sensor-related additions in Gen2v2. Others connect an external sensor front end to the chip. A third approach treats the tag’s own radio behaviour as the measurement, inferring a value from shifts in antenna impedance, backscatter strength or the turn-on power needed to bring the chip to life.

The consequence is a very different economic proposition from a BLE beacon or a LoRa sensor node. There is no cell to specify or replace, and no service visit when a battery dies inside a sealed assembly. A sensing tag costs pennies rather than pounds per measurement point, which changes what is worth instrumenting. Monitoring a few hundred high-value shipments is a familiar business case. Monitoring every carton, every implant, every concrete pour or every tyre on a fleet only becomes possible when the per-point cost collapses.

The trade-off matters just as much. A battery-free tag only produces a reading when a reader energises it, which makes RAIN sensing a good fit for inspection points, dock doors, portals, production line gateways and handheld sweeps, where a measurement taken at a defined checkpoint answers the question being asked. It is not, on its own, a continuous data logger. Designs that need a history between reads have to add energy storage, typically a capacitor or a thin printed cell, which brings back some of the cost and lifetime constraints the passive approach was chosen to avoid.

Where the tags are already deployed

The Alliance points to battery-free sensor tags running in live deployments across healthcare, food, transport and heavy industry:

• Pharmaceuticals and healthcare: temperature and humidity monitoring for vaccines, biologics and medicines, including wireless probes designed into pharmaceutical packaging.
• Food and perishables: freshness and quality tracking through the chain rather than a single reading on arrival.
• Medical devices: orthopaedic implants and prostheses, where a tag can report on a device nobody wants to open up to inspect.
• Tyres and batteries: tracking the parameters that determine how much useful life a component has left.
• Industrial machinery: bearing and turbine monitoring, feeding predictive maintenance rather than fixed service intervals.
• Concrete and infrastructure: temperature, moisture and strain readings taken from inside a structure.

“RAIN sensing combines unique identity with information about an object’s condition, making previously inaccessible information available at scale,” said Amendola. That combination is the point. The reader already knows exactly which item it is talking to, so a condition reading arrives attached to a serial number with no separate correlation step.

The regulatory pull

The strongest commercial driver behind the working group is the EU Digital Product Passport, which requires products to be identifiable and traceable, with batteries, tyres and textiles facing the earliest implementation deadlines in early 2027. Identity alone gets a product a passport. It does not keep the passport honest over a working life.

A battery passport is the clearest example. What a buyer, a recycler or a second-life integrator wants to know is not only which pack this is, but what condition it is in and what it has been through: how it has been charged, what temperatures it has seen, how much capacity remains. Tyres pose the same question in different terms, where remaining life depends on load, pressure and heat history rather than the moulded identifier on the sidewall. A passive sensing tag is one of the few ways to attach lifetime data to an individual item without adding a powered device to a product that has to survive years of rough handling.

That demand is what the Alliance says it is responding to. “Organizations are increasingly looking to capture real-time condition data on their assets,” said Aileen Ryan, President and CEO of the RAIN Alliance.

What the group will produce

The first deliverable is a white paper, “RAIN Sensors - From Vision to Adoption”, currently in development. It will map the technologies now available, set out the barriers slowing adoption and sketch a roadmap for growth, which should make it useful to integrators working out whether sensing RAIN is ready for a given problem.

The group meets every two weeks, on Thursdays at 16:30 CET. Participation ranges from sitting in on the discussion to contributing content, with leadership roles typically taking one to two hours a week. Existing RAIN Alliance members can ask about joining at operations@therainalliance.org, and companies that are not yet members at newmembership@therainalliance.org. Expect the subject to feature at RAIN in Action, the Alliance’s conference, held from 29 September to 1 October 2026 in Madrid.

Read more at https://therainalliance.org/rain-rfid-sensors/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The book carries photographs Nakazato took in the Canary Islands, the trip that shaped the collection. Holding a smartphone over the embedded tag opens a dedicated website with show footage and related material, so recipients could keep exploring the collection during the week and after it closed. Murata gives the tag as 13.56 MHz with a communication distance of a few centimetres, standard for near field communication.

The collection, titled Sea of Fire INFERNO and shown on 8 July, took its cue from the black volcanic cliffs and dark water of Tenerife. Garments shifted from blue to red on the runway, borrowing from monogi, the onstage costume change used in Noh and Kyogen theatre. Epson and YKK worked on it alongside Murata. July also marked ten years since Nakazato joined the official Paris couture calendar, still the only Japanese house on it.

Why an NFC tag rather than a printed QR code

Murata’s stated design argument is straightforward. The tag does its job without appearing on the page, so no visible 2D barcode has to compete with the photography. A printed code needs to be sized for reliable scanning and placed somewhere it will not wreck the layout. An NFC inlay sits inside the paper and leaves the artwork alone. On a shipping label that is a detail; on a photobook meant to work as an object, it is the point.

The other half of the case is the reader. Current iPhones and mainstream Android handsets read NFC natively, and iOS has supported background tag reading since iOS 13, so in most cases there is no app to install and nothing to launch. That is what makes a tag workable as a fashion week giveaway, where nobody will download software to look at a book handed to them on the way out.

Paper is a harder substrate than it looks

Getting an HF inlay into a bound book is a tougher piece of engineering than a garment hangtag. The reasons below are general RFID practice, not anything Murata has said about this particular build.

• An HF antenna is tuned against everything near it, so coated stock, adhesive and moisture in the paper all shift the resonant frequency.
• Metallic ink, foil blocking and gilded page edges are common in high end print and will detune or simply shield an antenna, so tag placement has to be agreed with the print finisher, not bolted on afterwards.
• Binding, pressing and trimming stress the inlay, and a cracked antenna loop or broken IC bond cannot be repaired once the book is glued.

Murata has not published a part number, IC vendor, memory size or antenna geometry, and has not said which NFC Forum tag type the inlay uses. Broadly, a tag used this way carries an NDEF record holding a URL, which is what lets a phone open the site with nothing in between.

Where this sits in fashion’s wider NFC push

Murata’s own framing is that RFID “is increasingly being used as a means of connecting physical objects and information” across manufacturing, logistics, retail and fashion, with traceability, product authentication and distribution channel management among the applications. The company says the collaboration shows how electronic component expertise can “create new value” and “enhance experiential value across a wide range of fields.”

That is more than sponsorship copy, because the same 13.56 MHz tag class is being asked to do several jobs in fashion at once. Brands already use NFC for authentication and resale verification, and the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is pushing textiles towards item level Digital Product Passports, which need a persistent machine readable carrier on the product. A tag that opens a show film today is the same class of device that will hold a garment’s compliance record tomorrow, which is a fair argument for reading a couture giveaway as a pilot rather than a stunt.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

So the architecture is now legally real. What it is not yet is usable. As of mid-August, no brand, manufacturer or solution provider has publicly confirmed a completed registration in the EU DPP Registry, and for the first mandated product group they could not have done so even if they wanted to. The registry’s semantic catalogue for batteries has not been defined, so battery passport submissions fail validation outright. The Commission’s own user guide for economic operators says so in plain language. What is open today is organisation enrolment, identity verification and rehearsal in the test environment.

That gap between a live system and a usable one is where the interesting decisions are being made, and most of them are carrier decisions. The regulation itself will not make those for you. It goes out of its way not to.

What Implementing Regulation 2026/1778 actually does

The first thing to understand about the registry is that it is not a passport database. It is a registration ledger and a directory. Article 3 sets out what it consists of: a web interface, an API, a verification platform, a mechanism for generating unique registration identifiers, storage of unique product identifiers and commodity codes, a public list of verified DPP service providers, a semantic repository, logging, and identification and authorisation schemes. The passport data itself stays with the economic operator or its appointed DPP service provider. The registry holds the pointer, the identifier and the back-up link.

The scope in Article 1 is wider than most coverage has acknowledged. This is not an ESPR-only registry. It serves products covered by ESPR delegated acts, batteries under Article 77 of the Battery Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, construction products under the new Construction Products Regulation, toys under the Toy Safety Regulation, detergents and surfactants under Regulation (EU) 2026/405, and any other Union law that requires DPP registration in future. Article 2 states flatly that for registry purposes, a battery passport is a Digital Product Passport. One registry, many regimes. That matters for anyone building infrastructure, because it means the integration you build for batteries is the same integration you will use for textiles and tyres.

Article 8 is the article that touches hardware. Registration happens at model, batch or item level, depending on what the applicable product act requires, and an item-level registration must also carry the batch and model identifiers alongside it. On submission the registry runs automatic checks: semantic conformity against the product group’s catalogue, granularity, commodity code validity, and the presence of a working link to the back-up passport. Pass those and you get a unique and persistent registration identifier.

Article 9 gives you a downloadable proof of registration, sealed with a Commission qualified electronic seal and timestamp, containing the product identifier, commodity code, operator identity, date and time, and a hash of the passport version. It is valid for 90 days per generation. Read one caveat carefully before anyone in your organisation starts calling this a compliance certificate: ESPR Article 13(5) says registry confirmation is not to be deemed proof of compliance. The checks are structural. They confirm the passport is well formed and reachable, not that its contents are true.

The seal, not the chip, is the first real bottleneck

Before you can register anything you must become a verified economic operator, and this is where companies are getting stuck right now. Articles 4 and 5 require EU-established legal persons to submit evidence of identity and establishment using a qualified electronic seal supported by a qualified certificate issued by a qualified trust service provider under eIDAS. Sole traders use a qualified electronic signature or a high-assurance eID. In practice that means procuring a QSeal certificate from a qualified trust service provider and applying it in PAdES format to a Commission-generated declaration PDF, which is a procurement and IT task that most product and packaging teams have never had to run before.

Verified status lasts a maximum of three years. Let it lapse and you cannot register or modify passports until you are re-verified. Article 5 extends the same process to value chain actors: repairers, refurbishers, remanufacturers and recyclers. In other words, the people you most want reading and writing to the passport in the field are subject to the same identity regime as the brand owner. Member States have until 18 February 2027 to appoint their designated national administrators under Article 7, which is the same day the first passports become mandatory. Default data retention is ten years.

If you sell RFID or AutoID into brands, this is worth knowing simply because it reorders the conversation. The carrier question is not the first thing a compliance lead will be dealing with. It is the second. But the two are linked, because the verification cycle and the three-year re-verification are precisely the sort of overhead that pushes organisations towards a single carrier strategy across product lines rather than a per-SKU decision.

Why the registry says nothing about QR, RFID or NFC

Search the full text of Implementing Regulation 2026/1778 for “QR”, “RFID”, “NFC” or even “data carrier” and you will find nothing. That is deliberate, not an oversight. The registry rules are carrier-neutral because the carrier decision sits elsewhere, in the product-group delegated acts.

The ESPR’s own definition is broad enough to keep every AutoID technology in play. Article 2(29) defines a data carrier as “a linear barcode symbol, a two-dimensional symbol or other automatic identification data capture medium that can be read by a device”. That final clause is the one the RFID industry has been leaning on for two years, and it holds. The only carrier examples anywhere in the regulation appear in recital 37, which mentions a watermark and a QR code, and recitals are not operative text.

The operative choice, meaning which carrier or carriers must be used, plus layout and positioning, is made per product group under Article 9(2)(b) and (c). Article 10(1) requires the carrier to be physically present on the product, its packaging or accompanying documentation, and to comply with the ISO/IEC 15459 series or with harmonised standards. Article 12(6) obliges the Commission to keep identifier and carrier rules technologically neutral to the largest extent possible.

So the framework is genuinely open. Whether any given product ends up with a printed QR code, an NFC tag, a RAIN RFID inlay or some combination will be settled product group by product group, in acts that mostly do not exist yet. That is the single most important thing for RFID vendors to internalise: the carrier fight is not over, it has barely started, and it will be fought in the textile act, the tyre act and the furniture act rather than in the framework.

EN 18220 puts RFID on the harmonised list

Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736 of 14 July, published on 15 July, harmonised six standards drafted by CEN/CENELEC JTC 24: EN 18216 on data exchange protocols, EN 18219 on unique identifiers, EN 18220 on data carriers, EN 18221 on data storage, archiving and persistence, EN 18222 on APIs and EN 18223 on system interoperability. Two more from the family of eight, EN 18239 on access rights and security and EN 18246 on data authentication, are expected to be harmonised around September 2026. Note that 2026/1736 is an implementing Decision, not a Regulation, whatever some secondary coverage says. Compliance with a harmonised standard gives presumption of conformity with ESPR Articles 10 and 11, which is the practical value here.

EN 18220:2026 is the one that matters to this readership. It covers optical 2D symbologies, meaning QR Code and Data Matrix, and RFID in both HF/NFC and UHF/RAIN forms, with requirements on symbology, encoding, production quality, print quality, durability, placement and marking. The governing principle running through it is persistence: the carrier has to stay readable for the life of the product, which for a tyre or a construction product is a long time and a hostile environment. There is also a widely reported requirement that at least one carrier must be readable by an ordinary smartphone without a dedicated app, which is the clause that keeps a 2D symbol on almost everything regardless of what else is fitted.

One honest caveat. EN 18220 is a paywalled 44-page document and the exact enumerated carrier list is not something the trade press has verified against the standard text. The RAIN Alliance describes RAIN as one of five approved data carriers recognised by JTC 24. Other summaries count four families. If you are writing a carrier specification that will be audited, buy the standard rather than trusting anyone’s blog, this one included.

EN 18219, the companion identifier standard, reportedly admits several identifier schemes including GS1 Digital Link URIs, IEC 61406 identification links, W3C decentralised identifiers, RFID and 2D product identifiers, and DOIs, with operator identifiers including the GLEIF LEI. The important structural point is that GS1 Digital Link is one route among several rather than the only one, even though it is comfortably the most commercially entrenched.

The carrier decision determines what the passport can actually do

Regulatory neutrality has an unhelpful side effect. It lets people treat the carrier as a late-stage packaging detail, when in fact it decides the entire operational value of the passport. A DPP is only worth what it costs to read, multiplied by how often you can afford to read it. That calculation changes completely depending on the carrier.

QR and Data Matrix

Cheapest per unit by an enormous margin, effectively free if you are already printing a label. Universally readable by consumers with no additional hardware. Line of sight required, one item at a time, and the read has to be a deliberate human act. Vulnerable to abrasion, soiling, overprinting and being covered by a later label. For consumer-facing disclosure, which is what most of the DPP’s stated purpose is about, it is entirely adequate. For anything involving reading a hundred items in a tote or verifying a returned garment at a goods-in desk, it is a bottleneck.

NFC

Short range by design, typically a few centimetres, which is a feature rather than a limitation when the interaction is intentional. Readable by every modern smartphone with no app install, which is the property that makes it the natural upgrade path from QR for premium consumer goods. It supports authentication and tamper evidence in ways a printed symbol cannot: NXP’s NTAG X DNA line is explicitly positioned for DPP on that basis. NFC also survives being covered, which matters for garment care labels and anything that will be laundered or re-packed. The NFC Forum published its NFC Digital Product Passport candidate specification in March 2025 and folded DPP support into NFC Release 15 in June 2025, which the Forum says extends read range roughly fourfold. Per-unit cost is real but has fallen sharply, and dual-frequency inlays have made the marginal cost of adding NFC to an existing RAIN tag smaller than it was.

RAIN RFID

The only one of the three that scales to bulk reading. Metres of range, no line of sight, hundreds of items per second, and the ability to read a sealed carton or a full rail of garments without touching anything. That is the property that turns a passport from a disclosure document into an operational data source. It is also the one carrier a consumer cannot read today, which is the standing objection to RAIN as a primary DPP carrier and the reason EN 18220’s smartphone-readability principle effectively guarantees a 2D symbol alongside it.

That objection is eroding, though not quickly. Qualcomm’s Dragonwing Q-6690, announced in September 2025, is described as the first enterprise mobile processor with fully integrated UHF RAIN RFID, with Zebra, Honeywell and Urovo among the adopters. That is enterprise handheld territory rather than consumer phones, so it fixes the read problem for staff in a store, a warehouse or a repair shop without doing anything for the shopper. Useful, but it does not remove the case for a 2D fallback.

Dual frequency, which is where the market is actually going

The interesting product releases of the last year have not picked a side. Tageos launched the EOS-920 NFC inlay and the EOS-620 Seal dual-frequency RAIN plus NFC inlay on EM em|echo-V silicon in December 2025, explicitly for DPP. Xindeco IoT unveiled a RAIN UHF-powered DPP solution in January 2026 with a dual UHF plus NFC and QR architecture. The logic is straightforward: RAIN handles the supply chain, NFC handles the consumer and the field technician, and a printed 2D symbol handles the regulator and the person with a flat phone battery. Three carriers, one identifier, one passport. It costs more per unit, and for high-value or long-lived goods it is defensible.

Item level versus batch level, and the serialisation question underneath it

Article 8’s granularity rule is the quiet hinge in the whole implementing regulation. Model, batch or item, as the product act requires. Everything about carrier economics follows from where a given product group lands.

At model level, a passport is a document about a product design, and a printed symbol is plainly sufficient. At batch level, you get provenance and recall precision but no individual unit history. At item level, every physical unit carries its own identity and its own record, and the passport can genuinely accumulate a history: repairs, ownership transfers, refurbishment, eventual material recovery.

Item level is also the point at which serialisation stops being free. A GTIN identifies a product line. A GTIN plus a serial number, encoded as an SGTIN in EPC terms, identifies a thing. That means serial number allocation and management at production line speed, and it means a carrier that can hold a unique value per unit. A printed serialised QR code can do that, at the cost of variable data printing and the associated print verification. A RAIN tag does it natively, because unique serialisation is the entire premise of the technology.

This is the strongest argument the RFID industry has, and it is worth making precisely rather than loudly. The joint RAIN Alliance and GS1 position paper of September 2025 makes it: GS1 identifiers plus RAIN give automatic and scalable access at item-level precision. Decathlon is quoted in that paper calling RAIN with GS1 encoding a de-facto reference solution for any Digital Product Passport system, and Michelin describes its tyre work built on GS1 identifiers and ISO RFID standards. That is not marketing from tag vendors, it is brand owners who already tag at item level for inventory reasons and can see that the passport rides along at close to zero marginal cost.

Where GS1 has actually landed, which is less favourable

It would be a mistake to read the joint paper as GS1 endorsing RFID as the primary DPP carrier. It has not. The GS1 in Europe position puts GTIN plus serial or lot as the product identifier and a GS1 Digital Link QR code as the primary carrier, aligned with the global Sunrise 2027 migration to 2D, with Data Matrix for space-constrained items. The provisional GS1 DPP application standard, GSCN-26-266 v2 of June 2026, is explicit: where EPC/RFID is used it shall be in addition to a QR Code or Data Matrix, and the barcode’s serial number must match the serial encoded in the SGTIN on the tag. NFC was added only in June 2026, and as an optional additional carrier.

In GS1’s scheme, then, RFID is supplementary. Not excluded, not discouraged, but never on its own. Anyone selling a RAIN-only DPP proposition into a GS1-aligned brand is going to lose that argument, and the sensible commercial position is the one the dual-frequency product launches have already taken: sell RAIN as the operational layer on top of a 2D baseline, not as a replacement for it.

The battery paradox

The first mandatory passport in Europe will not use RFID at all. Battery Regulation Article 13(6) requires that from 18 February 2027 all batteries are marked with a QR code as described in Part C of Annex VI, printed or engraved visibly, legibly and indelibly, or applied to packaging and documents where that is not possible. Article 77(3) makes that QR code the access route to the battery passport. From the same date, each LMT battery, each industrial battery above 2 kWh and each EV battery placed on the market must have a battery passport.

There is one door left open. Article 13(8) allows the Commission to adopt delegated acts providing for alternative types of smart labels for use instead of or in addition to the QR code, in view of technical and scientific progress. No such act exists and none is scheduled. If the RFID industry wants batteries, that article is the lever, and it will take evidence from deployed pilots rather than position papers.

Meanwhile the battery regime is running late in both directions. Registration is blocked by the missing semantic catalogue. And Article 77(9) required the Commission to adopt implementing acts specifying who counts as a person with legitimate interest in accessing restricted battery passport data by 18 August 2026. No such act appears to have been adopted, and the Commission’s own DPP timeline now shows it in Q4 2026. That is not a trivial slip. Legitimate-interest access is the mechanism by which a recycler or a second-life operator gets at the data that makes the passport worth having, and until it is defined, the three-tier access model in the Battery Regulation has a hole in the middle of it.

Four places the passport gets read, and why only one of them tolerates QR

The carrier argument becomes concrete the moment you follow a passport through its working life.

• In the warehouse, the read is bulk, unattended and high volume. Goods-in verification, cycle counting, dispatch confirmation. Line of sight is the enemy. RAIN is the only carrier that works here, and if the passport identifier is not on a RAIN tag, the warehouse simply will not use the passport, it will keep using whatever inventory system it already has.
• In the store, the read splits. Staff need bulk stock accuracy, which is RAIN, and is why apparel retailers already tag at item level. Shoppers need a self-service read, which today means QR or NFC. This is the clearest case for dual frequency, and it is not a DPP argument at all, it is an existing retail argument that the DPP happens to reinforce.
• In the repair shop, the read is deliberate, single item and needs authentication. Is this the genuine part, what is its service history, who is allowed to write to the record. NFC with cryptographic authentication is a better fit than either alternative, and the eIDAS verification requirement in Article 5 for repairers and refurbishers means the write side has an identity model attached to it.
• In the recycling facility, the read is the hardest problem in the whole chain. Items arrive damaged, soiled, compressed, mixed and often shredded. A printed symbol is frequently unreadable by the time it gets there, which is exactly when the material composition data in the passport is most valuable. Passive RFID at least degrades more gracefully. The RAIN Alliance and NFC Forum’s joint position on the WEEE Directive revision in March 2026 argued for passive RFID to remain outside the revised directive’s scope, and cited CIRPASS-2 testing passive RFID across textiles, electronics and batteries. Whether the tag survives the shredder is a separate and unsolved question.

What the pilots chose when they had a free hand

CIRPASS-2, the roughly 19 million euro Digital Europe programme project running to April 2027, has 49 partners and 13 lighthouse pilots across textiles, electronics, tyres and construction. Michelin’s tyre pilot is explicitly RFID, built on the ISO standard for electronic tyre identification plus the GDSO tyre industry dataspace, which is the single most convincing item-level RFID DPP deployment anyone can currently point at. Six textile pilots involve the usual traceability names, and the RAIN Alliance and NFC Forum claim up to 99 per cent identification accuracy with passive RFID in textile pilots, which is the Alliance’s own figure rather than an independently published CIRPASS-2 result.

Against that, Sweden’s Trace4Value textile pilot, run with TrusTrace, Kappahl, Marimekko and GS1 Sweden across more than 3,000 garments, used a plain GS1 Digital Link QR code and no RFID at all, and worked. That is the honest state of play. Where the operational case already exists independently of the regulation, as in tyres and in apparel inventory, RFID wins. Where the objective is disclosure to a consumer or a regulator, QR is sufficient and cheaper, and pilots keep choosing it.

There is also a design argument against putting much on the tag at all. The NFC Forum’s NDPP pitch is offline, on-tag passport data. The EU’s own CIRPASS project recommended the opposite in deliverable D3.3 back in February 2024: store an identifier URI in the carrier and nothing more, on the grounds that offline data storage adds cost and complexity without proportionate benefit. The harmonised standards, with their separate treatment of carriers, identifiers, storage and APIs, lean the same way. Sell the tag as the pointer, not the database.

Does any of this move tag volumes?

Be careful here, because the temptation to overclaim is considerable and the numbers do not support it. RAIN tag chip shipments fell in 2025 to 42.7 billion, down from a record 52.8 billion in 2024, which the RAIN Alliance attributed to inventory cycles, tariff uncertainty and retail destocking. The same announcement leaned on DPP qualification as a forward driver. VDC pushed its 115 billion unit milestone from 2028 out to 2029. IDTechEx forecasts the total RFID market at 23 billion US dollars by 2036 and names DPP as a growth support rather than a driver. ABI Research has projected 62.5 billion apparel DPPs created in 2030, but that counts passports, not tags, and gives no carrier split.

No analyst has published a figure isolating DPP-attributable RAIN or NFC tag volumes, and anyone quoting one is extrapolating. The realistic read is that the DPP does not create demand for tags on its own. What it does is remove objections. It gives a procurement case that was previously justified on shrink and inventory accuracy a second, regulatory-adjacent justification, and it makes item-level serialisation a compliance conversation rather than an operations one. That is worth something. It is not a step change in unit volumes.

Where this goes next

The Commission’s indicative timeline is now reasonably specific. Around September 2026, an implementing decision on the remaining two DPP standards, EN 18239 on access rights and security and EN 18246 on data authentication. Q4 2026, the ESPR delegated act for iron and steel, and the overdue battery access-rights implementing act. 18 February 2027, battery passports mandatory, QR marking mandatory on all batteries, and Member State national administrators appointed. Q2 to Q3 2027, delegated acts for construction products and for DPP service providers. Q3 to Q4 2027, the ESPR delegated acts for textiles, aluminium and tyres. Furniture in 2028. Mattresses and recycled content in 2029. Economic operators get at least 18 months of transition after each act, so textile obligations realistically bite around 2029. The ESPR Article 14 public web portal and the customs interconnection land at the far end, around 2029 to 2030, with the customs link legally due within four years of 2026/1778 entering into force.

Two of those dates deserve a ring on the calendar of anyone selling AutoID. The tyre delegated act, because tyres are the one ESPR priority product group with an established item-level RFID practice, an ISO electronic identification standard and a working industry dataspace, which makes it the most likely place for RFID to be named rather than merely permitted. And the textile act, because apparel is where item-level RAIN tagging already exists at enormous scale for entirely commercial reasons, and where the marginal cost of carrying a passport identifier on tags that are being applied anyway is close to zero.

Nothing in the framework will force that outcome. Carrier neutrality cuts both ways: it kept RAIN and NFC in scope when the obvious drafting instinct was to write QR into the text, and it also means neither will ever be mandated. The decision gets made product group by product group, in delegated acts drafted over the next eighteen months, and it gets made on evidence from deployments that either exist by then or do not. The registry going live changed the deadline. It did not change the argument, and the argument is being settled now in tooling quotes and label specifications, not in 2029.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The registry itself operates as a federated index, similar in concept to how DNS works for the internet. It does not store the full contents of every product passport. Instead, it records the existence of each DPP, holds key metadata, and resolves queries to the location where the actual passport data lives. Manufacturers remain responsible for hosting and maintaining their own passport content. The registry simply ensures that every product can be found, verified, and traced.

What makes this system practical is the GS1 Digital Link standard sitting underneath it. GS1 Digital Links encode product identifiers into web-resolvable URIs, and here is the critical detail for the RFID industry: these identifiers are designed to be compatible with both QR codes and RFID tags. This is not an afterthought. It is baked into the technical architecture from the ground up.

NFC tags are particularly well suited to consumer-facing DPP access. An NFC tag embedded in a garment label, a battery casing, or a piece of furniture allows anyone with a smartphone to tap and instantly retrieve that product’s full sustainability data. Material composition, recycled content percentages, carbon footprint figures, repairability scores, hazardous substance declarations, and end-of-life recycling guidance are all accessible with a single tap. No app download required. No manual searching. The product simply tells you its story.

On the supply chain side, UHF RFID brings a different but equally important capability. Bulk scanning at warehouse docks, distribution centres, and customs checkpoints means that thousands of products can be verified against the central registry in seconds rather than hours. As automated customs verification comes online over the next few years, UHF RFID will be the technology that makes real-time compliance checking feasible at the volumes the EU market demands.

The phased rollout adds urgency, although the registry going live does not on its own bring any product into scope. Each product group only becomes mandatory once its own delegated act is adopted, usually with at least 18 months to prepare. The first passport deadline is for certain batteries, on 18 February 2027, under the separate Batteries Regulation. Under the Commission’s working plan the act for iron and steel is expected in 2026, textiles and tyres in 2027, furniture in 2028 and mattresses in 2029, with aluminium due in 2027 or 2028. That means hundreds of millions of individual product passports across thousands of businesses, all needing reliable, durable identification technology that can survive the full product lifecycle, potentially ten years or more after a product leaves the market.

Platforms like Voittaa’s Digital Product Passport solution are already enabling businesses to create, manage, and maintain compliant product passports. Having the right platform infrastructure in place now, rather than scrambling as each sector’s deadline approaches, is the difference between a smooth transition and an expensive one.

A 2022 European Commission assessment found that 53 percent of environmental claims made by companies were vague or misleading. The DPP system, underpinned by verified data carried on RFID and NFC tags, is designed to end that ambiguity. When a product carries an NFC-enabled passport, the claims become verifiable on the spot.

The registry going live is not just a regulatory milestone. It is the moment when RFID and NFC shift from being useful supply chain tools to being essential compliance infrastructure for every company selling goods into Europe.

Updated 29 October 2026: the registry went live on 20 July 2026, not 19 July (the legal deadline). An earlier version said iron and steel products were covered from the registry launch; no delegated act for steel has yet been adopted, and the first passport deadline is for batteries in February 2027.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

This year’s theme, “From Infrastructure to Impact,” reflects a significant shift in the conversation around UHF RAIN RFID technology. Where previous years focused heavily on the nuts and bolts of deployment, the 2026 summit turns its attention to what happens after the infrastructure is in place. How are businesses translating RAIN-enabled systems into tangible results? What does real-world impact look like across different sectors?

RAIN Alliance President and CEO Aileen Ryan emphasised the growing momentum behind the technology. Adoption continues to accelerate, with RAIN RFID now touching industries well beyond its traditional retail stronghold. Ryan pointed to the approaching reality of RAIN-enabled smartphones and their potential role in the circular economy, particularly in supporting Digital Product Passport compliance across the European Union and beyond.

For businesses still weighing up their RAIN RFID strategy, the message from the Alliance is clear: the groundwork laid now will determine how smoothly organisations can participate in the connected product ecosystem that is rapidly taking shape.

Tageos, this year’s Titanium Sponsor, echoed that sentiment. CEO Matthieu Picon highlighted the importance of collaboration across the entire value chain, from chip manufacturers and tag converters through to system integrators and brand owners. With demand for innovation running high and the pace of technological development showing no signs of slowing, the summit offers a rare opportunity to strengthen partnerships and align on shared goals.

The three-day programme will feature a mix of live technology demonstrations, end-user case studies, and hands-on workshops. Sessions on the agenda cover a broad range of topics, including how RAIN technology is helping manufacturers meet Digital Product Passport requirements, the use of NFC and UHF RAIN in smartphones for enhanced consumer engagement, healthcare applications that leverage RAIN connectivity, and the development of battery-free RAIN sensors for smart home environments.

Distribution and logistics also feature prominently, with sessions exploring how RAIN RFID can close the persistent gap between system-level and physical inventory counts. This remains one of the most compelling use cases for the technology, delivering measurable ROI through improved accuracy and reduced shrinkage.

Ryan also stressed the importance of interoperability as RAIN RFID deployments expand into new sectors. With activations now spanning retail, healthcare, automotive, and manufacturing, the ability of different systems to communicate seamlessly is more critical than ever. The summit brings together solution providers, technology partners, and policymakers to collaborate on standards-based approaches that ensure long-term compatibility.

Registration details and the full speaker agenda are available through the RAIN in Action website. For anyone involved in RAIN RFID, whether as a technology provider, end user, or industry observer, the Madrid summit looks set to be a defining event for the sector in 2026.

https://www.raininaction.org/event/2026/home

Every RFID conference, showcase and trade show we know about is listed in the RFID News events calendar.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

At the heart of this shift is the digital product passport, or DPP. Driven largely by EU regulatory requirements, DPPs create a persistent digital identity for physical products. Each item carries a unique identifier, typically encoded on a UHF RFID tag or NFC chip, that links to a rich dataset covering material composition, manufacturing origin, repair history, and recycling instructions. Unlike a barcode that only identifies a product type, RFID-enabled passports identify the individual item and follow it from factory floor to recycling facility.

Material identification is where RFID proves especially valuable for recycling operations. When a garment or electronic device arrives at a sorting facility, its embedded tag can be read automatically and at speed, even without line of sight. The associated data tells operators exactly what materials are present, whether certain components need special handling, and which recycling stream the item belongs in. This is a significant step up from manual sorting, which is slow, error-prone, and often results in recyclable materials ending up in landfill simply because they could not be identified in time.

Reuse tracking adds another dimension. RFID tags persist through multiple ownership cycles, meaning a product that is resold, donated, or refurbished can carry its full history forward. A secondhand electronics retailer can scan an incoming device and instantly access its service record. A fashion resale platform can verify the authenticity and provenance of a pre-owned item. Each transaction gets logged against the product passport, building a richer picture over time and giving consumers genuine transparency about what they are buying.

Extended producer responsibility, or EPR, legislation is accelerating adoption. Under EPR frameworks, manufacturers bear financial and operational responsibility for their products after the consumer is finished with them. RFID provides the audit trail that makes compliance practical. Brands can demonstrate how many of their products were collected, what proportion were recycled versus sent to landfill, and where gaps exist in their recovery networks. Without item-level tracking, these obligations would be nearly impossible to meet at scale.

The EU is the primary regulatory engine here. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which began rolling out sector by sector from 2025, mandates digital product passports for categories including textiles, batteries, and electronics. The regulation specifies that product information must be accessible via a data carrier on the product itself, and RFID fits that requirement neatly. UHF RAIN RFID handles high-volume logistics and sorting scenarios, while NFC enables consumer-facing interactions through a simple smartphone tap.

Several pilot programmes are already demonstrating what this looks like in practice. Fashion brands are embedding UHF tags in garment care labels that link to material composition data and local recycling options. Battery manufacturers are using RFID to track cells through production, use, and collection for second-life applications in energy storage. Electronics producers are tagging components to streamline disassembly and recovery of valuable rare earth metals.

The infrastructure challenge remains real. Recycling facilities need RFID readers installed at intake points. Data platforms must be interoperable so that a passport created by one manufacturer can be read by any authorised party downstream. Standards bodies including GS1 and ISO are working to define common data structures and communication protocols, but industry-wide alignment is still a work in progress.

What is clear is that the circular economy cannot function on good intentions alone. It needs data, and it needs that data attached to the product itself. RFID delivers exactly that, turning every tagged item into a node in a transparent, traceable, and accountable product lifecycle. As regulatory deadlines approach and consumer expectations shift, the business case for RFID-enabled circularity is becoming difficult to ignore.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

NFC: A Specialised Branch of HF RFID

At its core, NFC is a subset of High-Frequency (HF) RFID technology. Both NFC and HF RFID operate at 13.56 MHz and rely on the same principle of inductive coupling, where a reader generates a magnetic field that powers a passive tag through electromagnetic induction. The key standards underpinning NFC, including ISO/IEC 14443 and ISO/IEC 18092, are built directly on established HF RFID protocols.

However, NFC distinguishes itself from general HF RFID in several important ways. While traditional HF RFID is typically one-directional, with a reader interrogating a passive tag, NFC supports genuine two-way communication between devices. It also operates at a much shorter range, typically four centimetres or less, which is a deliberate design choice that enhances security for sensitive transactions.

Three Modes of Operation

NFC devices can operate in three distinct modes, each serving different use cases.

Reader/Writer Mode allows an NFC-enabled device such as a smartphone to read data from, or write data to, passive NFC tags. These tags can be embedded in smart posters, product packaging, business cards, or stickers. When a phone is held near the tag, it wirelessly powers the chip through electromagnetic induction and reads the stored information, which might be a URL, contact details, or a command to launch an application. This mode is the foundation for smart poster campaigns and interactive marketing.

Peer-to-Peer Mode enables two active NFC devices to exchange data directly. Both devices generate their own radio frequency fields and take turns communicating. This mode supports sharing contacts, photos, files, or small data payloads simply by bringing two smartphones close together.

Card Emulation Mode transforms an NFC-enabled smartphone into a virtual contactless smart card. In this mode, the phone does not generate its own RF field. Instead, it responds to an external NFC reader just as a physical contactless card would. This is the mode that enables mobile payment services such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, as well as digital transit passes and building access credentials.

Smartphone Interaction and Contactless Payments

The widespread adoption of NFC in smartphones has been the single biggest driver of the technology’s growth. When a consumer taps their phone at a point-of-sale terminal, the phone’s secure element, a tamper-resistant chip that stores payment credentials, communicates with the terminal using card emulation mode. The transaction is protected by dynamic tokenisation, meaning a unique token is generated for each payment rather than transmitting actual card details. Combined with biometric authentication such as fingerprint or facial recognition, NFC payments offer a level of security that surpasses traditional magnetic-stripe cards.

Smart Posters and Beyond

Beyond payments, NFC tags embedded in posters, product labels, and signage allow consumers to access digital content with a single tap. A smart poster at a bus stop might link to real-time schedule information, while an NFC tag on a wine bottle could connect to tasting notes and origin details. These passive tags require no battery and can be reprogrammed, making them a cost-effective tool for bridging physical products with digital experiences.

As the NFC Forum continues to advance its standards, including faster data rates, wireless charging capabilities, and support for Digital Product Passports, the technology is set to play an even larger role in connecting the physical and digital worlds.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Retail Leading the Charge

UK retailers have been among the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of RFID technology. Major high street brands and grocery chains are deploying UHF RFID at item level to tackle inventory accuracy, which typically jumps from around 65% to above 95% after implementation. Companies such as Checkpoint Systems, which manufactures over two billion RFID tags annually, and Keonn, which has partnered with retailers including John Lewis and Boots, are helping UK stores unlock benefits ranging from automated stock replenishment to loss prevention and self-checkout innovation. The rise of e-commerce fulfilment has further accelerated demand, with over 5,000 UK logistics and retail companies now integrating RFID with IoT platforms to gain end-to-end supply chain visibility.

The NHS: A Global Benchmark for Healthcare RFID

Perhaps nowhere is the UK’s RFID story more compelling than in the National Health Service. Several NHS trusts have become global exemplars for hospital asset tracking. University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust operates the largest GS1-compliant passive RFID location system in the NHS, tracking 40,000 medical devices through more than 120 fixed readers and 350 connected antennae. Staff report spending 50% less time searching for equipment, translating to potential annual savings of GBP 2.6 million.

Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has cut average device search times to under 43 seconds using RFID, saving an estimated 88,000 staff hours per year across 2,500 employees. Their implementation earned recognition from NHS England and produced the Global Digital Exemplar blueprint for RFID and RTLS deployment. Other trusts, including NHS Lanarkshire, Mid Cheshire Hospitals, Royal Papworth Hospital, and United Lincolnshire Hospitals, are following suit with programmes covering everything from infusion pump tracking to cancer sample traceability. Many of these roll-outs fall under the Scan4Safety programme, a Department of Health and Social Care initiative promoting GS1 standards across clinical settings.

Key UK Integrators and Solution Providers

The UK benefits from a strong ecosystem of specialist RFID companies. CoreRFID brings over two decades of experience in tailored tracking and software solutions. RFiD Discovery has carved out a niche in healthcare and aviation baggage tracking, and is currently in discussions with NHS trusts to deploy automated contact tracing for infection control. Peak Technologies provides enterprise-grade RFID for supply chain management, while Zebra Technologies, Honeywell, and Impinj continue to expand their UK presence with hardware and software innovations spanning readers, tags, and cloud analytics platforms.

Government and Regulatory Tailwinds

The UK government’s push toward smart city infrastructure and digital public services is creating favourable conditions for RFID adoption. The Modern Digital Government Roadmap, published in January 2026, outlines plans to modernise public sector operations through technology including automated identification and data capture. Meanwhile, the EU Digital Product Passport regulation, which begins mandating item-level traceability for select product categories in 2026, is prompting UK manufacturers and exporters to invest in RFID-enabled compliance systems, even post-Brexit.

Additional funding signals reinforce the trend. The government has committed GBP 2 billion to artificial intelligence between 2026 and 2030, alongside GBP 500 million for an R&D Missions Accelerator Programme. These investments are expected to benefit RFID indirectly by advancing the AI and IoT platforms that increasingly underpin modern tag-reading infrastructure.

Opportunities Ahead

Looking forward, the convergence of RFID with AI, cloud computing, and IoT represents the biggest growth opportunity for UK adopters. Sustainability is another driver, with organisations embedding RFID into reusable packaging and circular economy workflows to improve lifecycle tracking and reduce waste. While challenges remain around upfront costs and SME awareness, the combination of proven NHS deployments, strong retail momentum, and supportive government policy positions the UK as a leading RFID market in Europe and beyond.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Tag Costs Have Hit New Lows

One of the most significant drivers behind RFID’s momentum in 2026 is the dramatic reduction in tag costs. Passive UHF inlays now sit between $0.05 and $0.15 per unit at high volumes, reflecting historic lows that are opening doors for organisations that previously considered the technology too expensive. Increased chip fabrication capacity, improved manufacturing yields, and large-scale sourcing by global retailers and brand owners have all contributed to this downward trend. For small and medium-sized enterprises in particular, these lower price points are removing one of the last major barriers to entry.

Improved Chip Performance

Alongside falling costs, RFID chip technology has advanced considerably. Modern UHF inlays feature enhanced antenna design and greater chip sensitivity, delivering reliable read performance even in dense, high-speed environments. Tags are getting smaller and more energy-efficient, enabling new applications in textiles, consumer goods, and smart packaging. Chipless RFID is also gaining traction as industries seek scalable alternatives that push costs even lower. These hardware improvements mean that RFID is no longer limited to warehouses and distribution centres; it is becoming viable at the individual item level across a wide range of sectors.

Software Maturity is Catching Up

For much of RFID’s history, the hardware led and the software lagged behind. That gap is closing rapidly. The industry is seeing a notable shift from basic middleware to full application platforms that deliver real-time scanning, advanced analytics, and deep supply chain integration. Enterprise software providers are building native RFID support into their platforms, and SaaS-based solutions are making deployment faster and more affordable. More than half of organisations now prefer integrated software platforms over standalone tools, a clear sign that the software ecosystem has matured to a point where it can deliver on the promise of the hardware.

Regulatory Drivers are Creating Urgency

Regulation is playing an increasingly important role in pushing RFID adoption forward. The EU Digital Product Passport, which mandates item-level traceability for select product categories starting in 2026, is one of the most prominent examples. In pharmaceuticals, requirements for drug traceability, cold-chain monitoring, and product authentication are making RFID an operational necessity rather than a nice-to-have. Food safety regulations are having a similar effect, with governments and industry bodies establishing interoperability standards that encourage global adoption. Retail mandates from major players like Walmart and Target continue to compel suppliers to adopt RFID tagging for compliance and supply chain visibility.

Proven ROI from Early Adopters

Perhaps the most powerful accelerant is confidence. The RFID industry has moved past the early adopter phase and into what analysts describe as the early majority stage. Organisations that deployed RFID in previous years are now reporting payback periods of 9 to 18 months in retail stores and 18 to 30 months for warehouse automation. Inventory accuracy improvements feature in nearly 70% of ROI calculations, and compliance gains drive more than half of all purchase decisions. These results are creating a ripple effect: as more businesses share measurable outcomes, others gain the confidence to move forward with their own deployments.

A Market at an Inflection Point

The global RFID market is projected to grow from approximately $14.6 billion in 2025 to over $30 billion by 2034, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of around 8.5%. With costs falling, chips improving, software platforms maturing, regulations tightening, and early adopters proving the business case, 2026 marks a clear inflection point. For businesses still on the fence, the question is no longer whether to adopt RFID, but how quickly they can get started.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The recognition was unplanned. Faced with seven finalists in the most competitive category of the evening, the jury decided to create an additional prize specifically for Ephem. That kind of spontaneous distinction says something about where the industry’s attention is heading.

Ephem labels tackle a problem that most connected packaging overlooks entirely. Brands invest heavily in sustainable materials, recycled substrates, and plant-based inks, only to attach a conventional NFC or UHF RFID inlay built from multiple layers of plastic and metal. Those inlays can persist in landfill for a century or more. Ephem replaces the typical seven-layer plastic construction with a four-layer architecture using FSC-certified paper, a conductive ink antenna, adhesive, and a release liner. There is no PVC, no PET, and no chemical etching involved.

The result is a fully functional NFC or UHF RFID label that delivers the same read range and chip compatibility as its conventional counterpart, but is certified compostable within 90 days by DIN CERTCO and TUV Rheinland. It is also recyclable in standard paper streams, verified by PTS Paper.

Milan is the third major European event to spotlight the technology in under a year. Ephem won the LuxePack in Green Award 2025 in Monaco on its very first entry, then reached the finals at the Cosmetic 360 Awards 2025 in Paris. Three events, three signals, all pointing toward growing industry demand for sustainable smart labelling.

The timing aligns with regulatory pressure building across Europe. The EU Digital Product Passport regulation takes effect in 2027, making connected labels mandatory for cosmetics brands. That obligation will drive massive adoption of RFID and NFC inlays. The question is whether brands will default to the cheapest plastic chip available or choose a material that matches the sustainability credentials of the rest of their packaging.

Philippe Henin, founder of Ma Balise, put it simply: brands spend years making their packaging irreproachable, then compromise it all with a plastic chip nobody questions. Ephem exists to close that gap.

For brands preparing for the Digital Product Passport mandate, Ephem offers a route to compliance that does not undermine their environmental commitments. And as Milan just demonstrated, the industry is paying attention.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Goodwin RFID, a China-based manufacturer specialising in embedded NFC solutions, has developed a concept that takes a different approach entirely. Instead of attaching a tag to a garment, the company has embedded an NFC chip directly inside the zipper hardware. The tag itself is a 5x5mm flexible printed circuit (FPC) component built around an NTAG213 chip operating at 13.56MHz. It sits inside the zipper pull, completely hidden from view. From the outside, it looks and functions like any standard metal zipper.

The size matters here. At just 5x5mm, the FPC tag is small enough to fit within the mechanical structure of a zipper pull without adding bulk, weight, or visual clutter. That allows it to be permanently integrated during manufacturing rather than applied after the fact. It cannot be removed without destroying the hardware itself, which makes it considerably harder to tamper with or counterfeit compared to stick-on labels or printed QR codes.

For the consumer, interaction is straightforward. A smartphone tap on the zipper pull triggers a near-field communication read, pulling up product information, authentication status, or any digital content the brand chooses to link. The close-range nature of NFC (typically a few centimetres) means the interaction is deliberate and private, not something that can be scanned from across a room.

Where this gets particularly interesting is in the context of Digital Product Passports. The European Union’s DPP regulations will require certain product categories to carry machine-readable digital identifiers that link to sustainability, material composition, and supply chain data. For fashion brands, finding a way to carry that identifier permanently and invisibly within the product has been a challenge. A label can be removed. A QR code can wear off. But a chip embedded inside a zipper pull is built into the product’s own hardware - it stays with the garment for its entire life, from production line to resale to recycling.

Goodwin RFID’s concept also hints at broader possibilities. If an NFC chip can be embedded inside a zipper, the same approach could work for buttons, rivets, snap fasteners, and other standard garment hardware. The company’s presentation materials reference smart buttons and embedded textile tags for items like socks, shoes, and hats. The underlying idea is that permanent hardware components could serve as long-term digital identity points, giving every garment a built-in connection to its digital record without changing how it looks or feels.

This is still a concept rather than a mass-market product, and there are practical questions around read reliability through different metals, cost at scale, and compatibility with existing garment manufacturing workflows. But the direction is clear. As DPP compliance timelines approach and brands look for authentication solutions that do not compromise design, invisible NFC integration in garment hardware could move from novelty to necessity.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

On-metal RFID has long been one of the trickiest challenges in the tagging world. Standard inlays detune or fail entirely when applied directly to metallic substrates, so equipment in sectors like energy, offshore and heavy manufacturing has often relied on bulky hard tags or mechanical fasteners. titanID Steel takes a different approach: a slim, self-adhesive form factor that herpa print says maintains reliable read performance even when bonded straight onto steel, aluminium or other conductive surfaces.

Durability is the headline claim. herpa print reports that the tag has been tested for more than twelve months at an offshore facility, where it was exposed to salt spray, UV radiation, extreme temperature swings, moisture ingress and sustained mechanical stress. The company says titanID Steel came through that trial with its RFID performance intact, positioning it as a credible option for long-term outdoor and industrial installations where regular tag replacement is impractical or costly.

Frequency options and customisation

Three frequency configurations are on offer. The HF/NFC-RFID variant supports close-range tap-and-read workflows common in maintenance and inspection routines. The UHF-RFID version delivers the longer read ranges needed for bulk inventory and logistics scanning. And the hybrid model combines both frequencies in a single label, allowing organisations to run NFC-based field checks alongside UHF-based automated reads from the same tag.

All three variants can be custom printed in multiple colours and produced in a range of sizes and shapes, so branding, safety markings or human-readable data can sit alongside the RFID functionality on one consolidated label.

Industrial use cases and Digital Product Passport integration

herpa print highlights several target applications for titanID Steel. Plant and machine marking is the most obvious fit, giving maintenance teams a permanent, scannable identifier on every asset. Facility managers can use the tags for building-services equipment, HVAC units, electrical panels and other fixed infrastructure that sits outdoors or in aggressive indoor environments such as washdown areas.

Beyond simple identification, the tag supports deeper digital workflows. Asset tracking systems can log each scan to build a maintenance history, while technicians in the field can tap an NFC-equipped phone to pull up technical documentation, service records or parts lists. The UHF variant opens the door to automated reads across loading docks, warehouses and yards, feeding real-time location data into supply chain platforms.

herpa print and its partner network within the WIOT Group also point to Digital Product Passport (DPP) integration as a key use case. As EU regulations push manufacturers toward machine-readable lifecycle data on physical products and assets, a tag that can survive years of outdoor exposure while carrying both NFC and UHF interfaces is well placed to serve as the physical anchor for a DPP record.

Target sectors

The company lists energy, offshore, logistics, manufacturing and facilities management among its primary markets. Equipment management in oil and gas installations, wind farms and substations is a natural fit, as is tracking containers, tooling and rolling stock across transport networks. Any operation that needs long-term, weather-resistant identification on metal assets is a potential customer.

For more information, contact Sales Manager Andreas Binder at herpa print GmbH on +49 2245 91 63-15.

Read more at https://www.herpa-print.de/news-detail/titanid-steel-2.html

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

The framework arrives at a time when agentic AI is moving from concept to deployment across supply chain operations. AI systems can now re-route shipments, trigger replenishment, isolate recalled products, and generate compliance records without human input. But these capabilities depend entirely on the quality of the data feeding them, and most existing RFID deployments in food and grocery were never built with machine consumption in mind.

According to Altinteg, the majority of current grocery RFID implementations were designed for human-readable dashboards. They lack the serialized item identity, structured event sequences, food-specific data fields, API-accessible outputs, and operational reliability that AI agents require. The result is a data layer that works well enough for manual oversight but falls short when autonomous systems need to make real-time decisions.

AIRA addresses this through five core pillars. Item Identity ensures every product carries a unique, serialized identifier. Event Capture defines structured sequences for tracking product movement. Food-Specific Data Fields cover attributes like temperature, shelf life, and batch information. Data Flow and API Readiness specifies how systems should expose information for machine access. Operational Reliability sets standards for uptime and data consistency.

The framework also introduces a five-level readiness score. Level 4, designated as the certification threshold, represents the point at which an RFID deployment can support autonomous replenishment, freshness management, compliance reporting, waste reduction, and recall isolation. Level 5 extends further into predictive freshness modelling, where AI agents anticipate spoilage and adjust operations proactively.

AIRA aligns with several established and emerging standards, including GS1 EPCIS 2.0, RAIN RFID specifications, the US FSMA Rule 204 for food traceability, and the EU Digital Product Passport regulation. This alignment positions the framework as a practical tool for organizations already working within these compliance structures.

Altinteg has published AIRA as open guidance, making it freely available rather than proprietary. The company, founded by Aliya Pogorelskaya, specialises in food, factory, agriculture, and infrastructure environments, and has previously developed its Traceability as a Service platform. That platform combines RFID infrastructure with IoT readers, cloud analytics, and Digital Product Passports to tackle product loss, which in food retail can reach waste levels of 50 to 60 percent of total volume.

With the GS1 Sunrise 2027 initiative accelerating the transition from legacy barcodes to 2D data carriers, frameworks like AIRA could play a significant role in ensuring the next generation of supply chain infrastructure is ready not just for human operators, but for the AI systems increasingly managing operations alongside them.

Read more at https://altinteg.com/news/altinteg-featured-in-womens-insider-transforming-retail-supply-chains-with-rfid-technology/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

Among the new additions, Abby Wu of Xindeco IoT joins with a focus on global business development, while Gwen Volpe from Fresenius Kabi brings deep expertise in medication technology and healthcare partnerships. James Goodland of NXP Semiconductors steps in as a leader in RAIN RFID solutions, and Jos Kunnen of Times-7 Research brings his experience in antenna design and research. Rounding out the new electees is Tristan Finet of Decathlon, who will champion RAIN RFID’s role as a citizen data carrier from an end-user perspective.

The four incumbents continuing their service are Juho Partanen of Impinj, Le Liu of Qualcomm, Michael Fein of Zebra Technologies and Pierre Muller of EM Microelectronic. Their ongoing involvement provides continuity as the alliance pursues some of its most ambitious initiatives to date.

It is good to see such a diverse board with a genuine range of experience and backgrounds. The mix of chip designers, solution providers, healthcare specialists and major retail end users like Decathlon reflects the breadth of industries that RAIN RFID now touches. That diversity of perspective will be essential as the technology moves into new sectors and use cases.

The board operates on a staggered two-year election cycle, ensuring a balance between fresh thinking and institutional knowledge. With billions of products already using RAIN RFID technology worldwide, the alliance is focused on several major priorities for the coming period. These include driving RAIN-enabled smartphone adoption, supporting Digital Product Passport legislation in Europe, advancing healthcare standardization efforts and establishing an e-waste workgroup focused on sustainability.

The smartphone opportunity, in particular, has several board members excited. When RAIN RFID capability is built into consumer handsets, the interoperability between tagged items and everyday devices could be transformative for both businesses and consumers. Combined with growing regulatory interest in Digital Product Passports, the technology stands to become even more deeply embedded in global supply chains.

Tire tracking is another area gaining traction, highlighting how RAIN RFID continues to find new applications beyond its traditional retail and logistics strongholds. The alliance, headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts and Brussels, Belgium, is well positioned to coordinate these global efforts across its membership base.

With a board that spans continents, industries and technical disciplines, the RAIN Alliance looks well equipped to guide the next phase of UHF RFID adoption. As several of the new directors noted, the most transformative chapter for the technology may still lie ahead.

Read more at https://therainalliance.org/meet-our-leadership-the-nine-industry-leaders-of-the-rain-alliance-board-of-directors/

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

What Is a Digital Product Passport?

A Digital Product Passport is a structured digital record that travels with a product throughout its lifecycle. It contains information about a product’s origin, materials, manufacturing processes, repairability, and end-of-life recycling instructions. The EU introduced the DPP framework under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), adopted in 2024, with the goal of driving circular economy practices and giving consumers transparent access to sustainability data.

The regulation targets specific product categories in phases. Batteries were first, with requirements already taking shape. Textiles and electronics follow closely, with broader rollouts expected through 2027 and beyond. By the end of the decade, most products sold within the EU market will need a DPP.

Why RFID Is the Natural Fit

While QR codes and other optical identifiers have their place, RFID offers distinct advantages that make it the preferred carrier technology for DPP data links.

UHF RFID, particularly RAIN RFID based on the ISO 18000-63 standard, enables bulk reading of tagged items without line-of-sight. A warehouse receiving hundreds of palletised goods can verify DPP compliance in seconds rather than scanning individual codes one at a time. For manufacturers dealing with high-volume production lines, this speed is not optional. It is essential.

NFC, operating at 13.56 MHz under ISO 14443 and ISO 15693, adds a consumer-facing layer. Shoppers can tap an NFC-enabled product with their smartphone to instantly access the DPP record, viewing details about where a garment was made, what chemicals were used, or how to recycle the packaging. This tap-to-read simplicity closes the gap between regulation and real-world usability.

Dual-frequency inlays combining UHF and NFC on a single tag are gaining traction for exactly this reason. They serve the supply chain’s need for speed and the consumer’s need for convenience in one integrated solution.

What Manufacturers Need to Prepare

Compliance with the DPP regulation is not a switch that flips overnight. Manufacturers should begin preparing now across several fronts.

First, data infrastructure needs attention. A DPP requires accurate, structured data about every product. Companies that lack robust product lifecycle management (PLM) systems will need to invest in capturing and organising this information.

Second, tagging strategy matters. Selecting the right RFID inlay, whether UHF, NFC, or dual-frequency, depends on the product type, packaging constraints, and where in the supply chain the tag will be read. Embedding RFID into garment labels differs significantly from tagging battery modules or electronic components.

Third, serialisation is critical. Each product needs a unique identifier linked to its DPP record. GS1 standards, including the SGTIN and GIAI schemes, provide the framework for this, and many RAIN RFID deployments already support GS1 EPC encoding natively.

A Practical Compliance Roadmap

For companies looking to get ahead of the curve, a phased approach makes sense.

In 2025 and 2026, focus on auditing existing product data and identifying gaps. Engage with your RFID tag suppliers and solution providers to evaluate tagging options. Run pilot programmes on a single product line to test data capture, tag performance, and system integration.

Through 2027, scale tagging across priority product categories. Integrate DPP data flows with existing ERP and supply chain management platforms. Ensure your serialisation processes align with GS1 standards.

From 2028 onward, expand to full product coverage as regulatory deadlines arrive for additional categories. Monitor evolving EU guidance and adjust your approach as standards mature.

The DPP regulation is not just a compliance burden. It is an opportunity to build trust with consumers, improve supply chain visibility, and future-proof operations. RFID technology, proven across billions of tagged items worldwide, provides the foundation to make it work at scale.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.

So what is fuelling this momentum, and where does the technology go from here?

The Chip Shortage Is Finally Behind Us

Between 2021 and 2023, the global semiconductor crunch hit RFID hard. UHF tag IC demand outstripped supply by more than 50% at its peak, lead times ballooned, and prices spiked across the board. Manufacturers began stockpiling chips, which only amplified the panic.

By mid-2024, new wafer fabrication capacity from the likes of TSMC and GlobalFoundries started to ease the bottleneck. Today, supply chains have normalised, inlay prices for standard UHF tags have dropped below $0.04, and the market is shipping an estimated 55 billion passive RFID tags annually. The shortage left its mark, though. It forced the industry to diversify its supply base and gave domestic chip producers in China a significant opening they have been quick to exploit.

Retail Mandates Keep Expanding

Retail remains the single largest driver of RFID adoption, accounting for over a third of the market. Walmart’s ongoing rollout continues to pull suppliers into item-level tagging, and the scope has widened well beyond apparel. Electronics, home goods, stationery, and even perishable goods are now in play.

The payoff is tangible. Retailers deploying RFID consistently report on-shelf availability above 95%, inventory accuracy improvements of 25% or more, and meaningful reductions in shrinkage. For grocers, RFID-enabled expiry tracking is proving its worth in reducing food waste, a metric that resonates with both the bottom line and sustainability targets.

Digital Product Passports Are Changing Everything

Perhaps the most consequential development for RFID in 2026 is the EU’s Digital Product Passport (DPP) framework. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which came into force in July 2024, nearly all physical goods sold in the EU will eventually need a digital record covering material composition, carbon footprint, repairability, and end-of-life recycling instructions.

The first delegated acts are landing now. Textiles compliance rules are being published in early 2026, with iron and steel following shortly after. Batteries already have their own passport requirement arriving in February 2027. By 2030, the EU wants full coverage across all major product categories.

Each product must carry a scannable data carrier linking to its passport. QR codes will handle some of this, but for supply chain environments where line-of-sight scanning is impractical, RFID and NFC are the obvious choice. This regulation is not just a European story either. Any manufacturer selling into the EU market must comply, which means global supply chains need to get on board.

The Sustainability Push

Sustainability is no longer a side conversation in RFID circles. It is a core business driver. Beyond DPPs, brands are using RFID to track garments through circular economy programmes, verify ethical sourcing claims, and monitor waste streams. The technology’s ability to provide item-level traceability from raw material to recycling bin makes it a natural fit for ESG reporting requirements that are tightening across multiple jurisdictions.

Tag manufacturers are also cleaning up their own act. Recyclable antenna substrates, thinner inlays, and reduced use of hazardous materials in chip packaging are all gaining traction as the industry practises what it preaches.

AI and IoT Integration

RFID is no longer just about identification. Paired with AI and cloud platforms, it is becoming a real-time data engine. Machine learning algorithms are being layered on top of RFID data streams to deliver predictive inventory management, anomaly detection in supply chains, and automated replenishment triggers.

In healthcare, RFID-enabled asset tracking combined with AI is helping hospitals locate equipment in seconds, manage pharmaceutical inventories with near-zero error rates, and improve patient safety through automated medication verification.

What Comes Next

The RFID market in 2026 sits at an inflection point. Regulatory tailwinds from the EU’s DPP programme, continued retail expansion, and the integration of AI are combining to push the technology deeper into everyday commerce and industry. UHF remains the dominant frequency band, commanding over 40% of the market, but NFC is seeing renewed interest thanks to consumer-facing applications like product authentication and smart packaging.

The companies that thrive will be those that treat RFID not as a compliance checkbox but as a data platform. The tag on the product is just the starting point. The real value lies in what you do with the information it carries.

This article first appeared on RFID News (rfidnews.co.uk), the independent news site for RFID and NFC. Republication and AI use are welcome with RFID News credited as the source and a link to the original.