The tags already carried Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) Design Recognition in North America. With the addition of RecyClass approval, multinational brand owners can now deploy a single RFID label construction across international supply chains, confident that it meets the recyclability criteria set by both frameworks.

The achievement matters because PET is one of the most widely recycled packaging materials in the world, used in everything from beverage bottles to food containers and cosmetics packaging. Attaching UHF RFID tags to PET containers has historically raised concerns about contamination during mechanical recycling. Metal inlays and adhesive residue can degrade the quality of recovered PET flakes, undermining the circular economy goals that brands are under growing pressure to meet.

AD CleanFlake addresses that tension directly. The solution pairs Avery Dennison’s proprietary CleanFlake adhesive technology with a patent-pending RFID inlay and label construction designed to separate cleanly from rigid PET during the wash and flotation stages of mechanical recycling. The result is PET flakes free of adhesive and metal contamination, suitable for reuse without sacrificing the traceability and inventory visibility that RFID delivers.

The timing is significant. The EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will require brands to demonstrate recyclability at scale, and RecyClass Technology Approval provides third-party verification that the AD CleanFlake construction fits within those evolving requirements. Meanwhile, 96% of the top 50 consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands have committed to recyclability and waste management targets, creating strong demand for packaging components that do not compromise recycling streams.

Pascale Wautelet, vice president of global R&D and Sustainability at Avery Dennison Materials Group, said the dual recognition confirms that RFID and PET recyclability no longer need to be in conflict. “Brands operating across North America and Europe now have a single, approved solution that works within both recycling infrastructures, without compromise,” she said.

Paolo Glerean, chairman of RecyClass, noted that the approval reflects the organisation’s science-based testing methodology and Avery Dennison’s commitment to advancing circularity. “This Approval serves as a testament that recyclable solutions are readily available on the market,” he said.

For brands deploying UHF RFID across PET packaging lines, the dual recognition removes a longstanding barrier. Design-for-recycling requirements no longer force a choice between item-level traceability and end-of-life material recovery. With a single tag construction validated on both sides of the Atlantic, supply chain teams can standardise their labelling approach while satisfying regional recycling compliance obligations.

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M&S started its RFID journey with a modest pilot project tagging men’s suits. The early results were promising enough to justify further investment, but progress was slow. The technology was expensive, with tags costing roughly five times what they do today, and the business case was still being built one department at a time.

The Beauty Product Problem

As M&S expanded RFID tagging across its non-food product lines, beauty and cosmetics products emerged as the most stubborn challenge. The physical properties of these items, including metal components in packaging, foil-lined containers, and liquid contents, created significant interference with radio frequency signals. Standard RFID tags simply could not deliver reliable reads when attached to products containing metal or liquids.

Working closely with longtime partner Avery Dennison, M&S invested years in developing specialised tag formats to overcome these obstacles. The collaboration produced 10 distinct tag formats and, because the retailer uses different colour codes for various product categories, a total of 70 tag variations. Some were designed specifically for apparel, others for beauty products, and still others for items containing metal or liquids. Each tag also had to meet the aesthetic standards demanded by cosmetic manufacturers, adding another layer of complexity.

Overcoming Senior Management Resistance

Perhaps even more challenging than the technical hurdles was the battle for internal buy-in. Richard Jenkins, M&S’s head of loss prevention and the driving force behind the RFID programme, has spoken candidly about the resistance he faced from senior leadership. There were individuals in senior positions who lacked understanding of the technology yet spoke with great confidence about its limitations. During particularly difficult periods, Jenkins and his team had to fight against active de-investment in the programme.

To counter this scepticism, M&S established a cross-functional steering committee that brought together representatives from corporate leadership, IT, store operations, and finance. Retail and store staff provided frontline feedback on deployment issues, while finance executives helped build a rigorous business case demonstrating clear return on investment for each phase of the rollout.

Testing, Validation, and Results

M&S took a methodical approach to validation, constructing a mock store at its headquarters to test tag performance across different materials before rolling out to live retail environments. This careful testing regime helped the team achieve consistent, accurate reads even on traditionally difficult product categories.

The results speak for themselves. SKU accuracy improved from just 68 per cent when the project expanded to a full product range in 2014, to an impressive 91.5 per cent by the second half of 2021. The retailer now uses approximately 350 million RFID tags per year across its stores.

Lessons in Persistence

The M&S story offers several valuable lessons for any organisation considering RFID adoption. First, technical challenges like metal and liquid interference are solvable with the right partnerships and sufficient investment in tag development. Second, internal resistance from senior management can be just as significant a barrier as any technical limitation. Building a cross-functional team with clear ROI metrics is essential for maintaining momentum. Third, bringing software development in-house gave M&S greater control and agility, helping the retailer adapt the technology to its specific needs.

M&S’s own-brand business model also proved to be a strategic advantage, enabling tagging at source rather than in-store. This simplified logistics and reduced costs, a benefit that retailers relying heavily on third-party brands may find harder to replicate.

Today, M&S continues to push the boundaries, exploring robotic tag reading in stores and planning new formats where automation can track every item entering and leaving in near real time. The retailer’s RFID journey is a testament to what persistence and strategic thinking can achieve, even when the odds and the boardroom seem stacked against you.

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ReCircled, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, designs and runs circular programs for apparel and footwear brands. The company takes in end-of-life garments, breaks them down by removing components like buttons and zippers, and processes the fabric into raw fibres for reuse. As demand for these services grows, the manual identification and sorting of incoming items has become a significant bottleneck, slowing throughput and introducing errors that reduce the value recovered from each batch.

To address this, ReCircled partnered with Avery Dennison to run a side-by-side comparison of manual sorting against an RFID-enabled workflow. The solution combined Avery Dennison’s embedded UHF RFID sensor technology, compatible RFID hardware, and the atma.io connected product cloud platform. Together, these components assign a unique digital identity to each garment, allowing automated capture of product data throughout the item’s lifecycle.

The pilot involved two major global apparel brands, and the efficiency gains were striking. For one brand, RFID scanning reduced the labour hours needed for product identification by 95.9%. For the other, the reduction was 99.9%. At the same time, accuracy jumped to 99% across the board, compared to manual accuracy rates of just 89% and 72% for the two brands respectively.

Beyond speed and accuracy, the RFID system captured richer data for every garment, including Electronic Product Codes (EPC) and material weight information. This additional detail proved particularly valuable for external reporting and for unlocking revenue streams that manual processes cannot efficiently support. One key example is Duty Drawback compensation, where brands can reclaim duties on damaged or unsold goods returned for recycling. With RFID, individual items can be tracked and documented at a fraction of the traditional labour cost, making single-item Duty Drawback claims practical for the first time.

The economic conclusions were clear. The savings from faster, more accurate processing, combined with newly accessible value streams like Duty Drawback, were enough to more than offset the initial investment in RFID infrastructure. For brands already tagging products at the point of manufacture, the incremental cost of enabling circular sorting is minimal.

Scott Kuhlman, CEO of ReCircled, said the technology is already reshaping operations: “RFID allows us to instantly identify hundreds of items, minimising manual labour, reducing errors, and is the key to unlocking full automation.”

The remaining challenge is adoption at scale. For RFID-enabled circularity to reach its full potential, brands need to embed digital identities into garments at the point of manufacture. That foundational step ensures every product is equipped for sorting, recycling, resale, or other end-of-life pathways from day one.

Read more at https://apparelsolutions.averydennison.com/en/perspectives/recircled-case-study

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The results come at a pivotal time for Avery Dennison’s RFID and digital identification business, which sits within the company’s Solutions Group. While the broader company delivered solid top-line growth, the Solutions Group saw sales decline 2.8% to $649 million during the quarter, with adjusted operating margin falling 120 basis points to 9.0%.

Within the Solutions Group, performance was mixed. High-value categories including Embelex and Vestcom grew at mid-single digit rates, but the Intelligent Labels division, which encompasses Avery Dennison’s UHF RFID inlay and tag business, declined modestly. The Intelligent Labels unit is one of the world’s largest producers of UHF RFID tags and inlays, supplying major retailers and brands across the fashion, retail and logistics sectors.

CEO Deon Stander pointed to the resilience of the company’s overall portfolio, noting that results reflected its ability to deliver growth in what he described as a dynamic environment. The modest decline in Intelligent Labels comes after a period of rapid expansion in prior years, driven by large-scale RFID rollouts across global retail.

The company’s Materials Group performed more strongly, with sales increasing 11.4% to $1.6 billion. On a constant currency basis, growth was 3.6%. Adjusted operating margin for the segment was 15.4%, down 20 basis points from the prior year. Base categories in the Materials Group grew at mid-single digit rates, while high-value categories saw a slight decline.

Avery Dennison continued to return capital to shareholders during the quarter, distributing $133 million through dividends and repurchasing $61 million in shares. The company’s net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA ratio stood at 2.4 times at the end of the period. Reported earnings per share for the quarter were $2.18.

Looking ahead, Avery Dennison provided guidance for the second quarter of 2026, forecasting adjusted EPS in the range of $2.43 to $2.53. Industry analysts will be watching the Intelligent Labels business closely in coming quarters, as adoption of UHF RFID technology continues to expand beyond fashion retail into food, logistics and healthcare applications.

The slight pullback in Intelligent Labels growth is not uncommon in quarters where large deployment programmes reach completion milestones before new rollouts begin. Avery Dennison remains a dominant force in the UHF RFID market and continues to invest in next-generation digital identification solutions.

Read more at https://www.averydennison.com/content/corp/na/en/home/news/press-releases/avery-dennison-announces-q1-2026-results.html

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Announced from Mentor, Ohio on 27 April 2026, the strategic investment deepens a relationship that has been quietly maturing since 2022. It also formalises Avery Dennison’s role as Wiliot’s preferred inlay design, manufacturing, and commercial partner, and gives the global labelling giant a full board seat alongside the observer position it already held.

The headline number is the easy bit. The strategic logic underneath it tells a more interesting story for anyone watching how the identification and sensing market is shifting.

Wiliot’s IoT Pixels are stamp-sized, battery-free compute devices that harvest energy from ambient radio waves and report data over Bluetooth Low Energy. Pair them with cloud-based AI and machine learning, and you get continuous visibility of inventory, location, and condition across retail backrooms, distribution centres, and food cold chains. The pitch is supply chain intelligence at the item level, with infrastructure costs much closer to passive RFID than to traditional active sensor networks.

Francisco Melo, president of intelligent labels technologies and digital solutions at Avery Dennison, framed the move in plain terms. “We believe in passive Bluetooth Low-Energy and the opportunity to expand our portfolio with Wiliot’s solutions,” he said, adding that BLE is complementary to RFID and opens up new addressable markets the company could not previously serve with UHF RAIN tags alone.

For Wiliot, having an inlay manufacturer of Avery Dennison’s scale on board removes one of the biggest blockers to mass adoption of ambient IoT: industrial-grade tag production. Co-founder and CEO Tal Tamir was direct about the significance. “Avery Dennison is a global leader in digital identification solutions and the premier partner required to realize accelerating demand,” he said.

The two companies say they will now expand their joint go-to-market efforts across retail, logistics, and food, the same verticals where item-level RFID has driven much of Avery Dennison’s recent growth in intelligent labels.

For the wider RFID and auto-ID industry, the message is clear. Passive UHF RFID and ambient BLE are not in competition. They are stacking. UHF still wins for fast bulk reads at portals and dock doors. Battery-free BLE adds richer sensor data and direct readability from any modern smartphone or tablet. Brands that want to know where every unit is, what condition it is in, and how shoppers interact with it will increasingly want both technologies on the same item, often in the same inlay.

With $75 million of Avery Dennison capital now on the table, that vision just got a significant push toward scale.

Read more at https://averydennison.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/avery-dennison-announces-strategic-75-million-investment-wiliot

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Acrylic esters are a critical raw material in pressure-sensitive adhesives, the very adhesives that secure RFID inlays within smart labels used across retail, logistics, and supply chain applications. By switching to acrylates produced with renewable electricity, manufacturers of RFID inlay tags can reduce the carbon footprint of their products without any compromise on performance. BASF confirms the new acrylates are functionally equivalent to their conventional counterparts and work as drop-in replacements, meaning no retooling or reformulation is needed on the production line.

For the RFID sector, this is a meaningful step forward. As major retailers and logistics providers push for greener supply chains, the environmental credentials of every component in an RFID tag come under scrutiny. The adhesive layer that bonds a UHF RFID inlay to its substrate is no exception. With billions of RFID inlay tags produced each year for applications ranging from garment tagging to pallet tracking, even modest reductions in per-unit emissions add up quickly at scale.

Avery Dennison, one of the world’s largest producers of RFID inlays and smart labels, was the first company to commercialise these renewable energy acrylates. The move supports the company’s target of a 30% reduction in Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions and aligns with broader industry efforts to decarbonise the RFID supply chain from raw materials through to finished tags.

“This accomplishment highlights the power of investing in responsible production and efficient, future-ready operations,” said Michael Limbach, Vice President at BASF’s Performance Chemicals division. Collins Oluka, Vice President of Global Procurement and Sustainability at Avery Dennison, added that innovations like renewable-energy-enabled acrylic esters help advance the company’s long-term sustainability goals.

The collaboration signals a growing trend in the RFID industry: sustainability is no longer limited to how tags are used, but extends to how they are made. As RAIN RFID adoption continues to accelerate across retail, healthcare, and logistics, the demand for greener inlay production will only increase. Partnerships like this one between BASF and Avery Dennison demonstrate that reducing emissions and maintaining product quality can go hand in hand.

Read more at https://www.averydennison.com/en/home/news/press-releases/basf-and-avery-dennison-collaborate-to-launch-acrylates-based-on-renewable-electricity.html

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The integration centres on Pragmatic’s NFC Connect PR1301 product line, a flexible IC designed specifically for NFC applications. Unlike conventional silicon-based chips, the FlexIC is ultra-thin, flexible and robust enough to be applied to curved and irregular surfaces. That makes it a natural fit for packaging formats where rigid silicon chips have traditionally struggled, from bottles and tubes to pouches and blister packs.

For brands, the technology opens up a straightforward route to secure smartphone-tap interactions on packaged goods. A consumer simply taps their phone against the product to access digital content, verify authenticity or engage with brand experiences. There is no app required and the interaction works across both iOS and Android devices, following standard NFC protocols.

The environmental angle is worth noting too. Pragmatic’s manufacturing process uses significantly fewer chemicals, less energy and less water compared to traditional silicon semiconductor fabrication. For companies under pressure to reduce supply chain environmental impact, that is a meaningful differentiator when selecting NFC components at scale.

Target applications span retail, healthcare, digital brand experiences, product authentication and Digital Product Passport (DPP) compliance. With EU regulations on DPPs approaching implementation deadlines, the ability to cost-effectively tag individual items with NFC could prove critical for brands selling into European markets. The technology also supports edge and item-level intelligence, giving supply chain operators visibility down to the individual product rather than just the case or pallet level.

Mathieu De Backer, Vice President at Avery Dennison, highlighted NFC as increasingly important digital infrastructure for consumer-facing products. Meanwhile, James Davey, Senior Vice President at Pragmatic Semiconductor, pointed to the partnership as a route to delivering deeper consumer engagement at a scale that has not previously been achievable with flexible NFC technology.

The combination of low-cost item-level tagging, flexible form factor and sustainable manufacturing positions this as a serious proposition for brands looking to move beyond barcode-only identification. Whether the driver is regulatory compliance, consumer engagement or supply chain visibility, having a flexible NFC inlay that can be produced and applied at mass scale removes one of the key barriers that has historically limited NFC adoption on fast-moving consumer goods.

Read more at https://rfid.averydennison.com/content/rfid/na/en/home/news-insights/press-releases/avery-dennison-announces-first-to-market-integration-of-pragmatic-semiconductors-chip-on-a-mass-scale.html

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The new inlays sit within the company’s Optica Food Solutions portfolio and are engineered to tackle the specific RF challenges that have historically made tagging fresh food unreliable. High-moisture products, cold storage environments and tightly packed shelf layouts all degrade read performance with conventional inlay designs. IdentiFresh addresses this through a proprietary antenna geometry and inlay construction that maintains consistent readability even on densely stacked items in chilled meat cases and refrigerated display units.

At the IC level, the inlays leverage Impinj’s M800 series endpoint ICs with Gen2X capability, delivering improved tag population management and faster inventory reads in challenging conditions. The compact form factor has been designed to integrate with existing label formats, so retailers and suppliers can adopt the technology without overhauling their current labeling equipment or workflows.

The flexibility of the platform supports both in-store and supplier-side tagging. That distinction matters because it gives retailers multiple deployment paths. A grocer could begin by tagging at the store level to gain immediate shelf-level inventory accuracy, then extend upstream to supplier facilities as the programme scales.

The launch builds on Avery Dennison’s existing work with major US food retailers including Walmart and Kroger, both of which have been exploring RFID adoption across fresh categories.

The timing is significant. A recent survey of 3,500 food retailers and supply chain leaders globally found that 50% identified meat as a particularly difficult category for waste, with 45% citing produce and 28% pointing to baked goods. Over half of respondents said that poor inventory management and overstocking are major contributors to food waste, a problem whose economic cost across the global supply chain is projected to hit $540 billion by 2026.

Mathieu De Backer, VP of Intelligent Labels Innovation at Avery Dennison, described the launch as a breakthrough that enables reliable RFID use on fresh items from production through to the point of sale. George Dyche, VP of Endpoint IC Product at Impinj, noted the broader benefit simply: when food is sold before it expires, everyone wins.

For the wider RAIN RFID ecosystem, IdentiFresh represents a meaningful step. Fresh food has long been considered one of the hardest retail categories to tag at item level. If the read performance claims hold up across real-world deployments, this could accelerate adoption well beyond the apparel and general merchandise categories where UHF RFID is already established.

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The initiative tackles a longstanding industry challenge: applying RFID in high-moisture, cold-case environments. By creating sensor-enabled RFID labels that can operate reliably in refrigerated and wet conditions, the partners are enabling item-level tracking of fresh-food inventory for the first time.

With this technology, store associates at Walmart will be able to access digital use-by dates, monitor freshness and optimise product rotation with greater speed and accuracy. The ability to track each item’s digital identity means fewer manual tasks and smarter markdown decisions, which in turn helps reduce food waste and improve operational efficiency.

Julie Vargas, Vice-President and General Manager of Avery Dennison Identification Solutions, described the work as “first-to-market RFID innovation across multiple fresh-food categories” and emphasised the mutual commitment of both companies to people and the planet. Christyn Keef, Vice-President of Front End Transformation for Walmart U.S., added that the goal is to make technology work for associates and customers by reducing manual labour and allowing more focus on service. 

From a strategic perspective the collaboration aligns with Walmart’s broader sustainability objective of halving global operational food loss and waste intensity by 2030. By enabling automated item-level identification in fresh departments the retailer is integrating a new generation of supply-chain intelligence into its store operations. 

For Avery Dennison this development reinforces its position in the digital-identification domain by applying its Optica solutions portfolio to a complex and demanding environment. The move signals the expansion of RFID from apparel and general retail into high-moisture food segments.

Despite the promise there are implementation challenges ahead. Cold-chain conditions present unique demands for tag durability, readability and attachment methods. Store-floor workflows will need to adapt to integrate item-level data into associate tasks. And store systems will need to ingest and act upon fresh-food data in real time. Still the benefits are compelling: improved freshness perception for shoppers, reduced waste and tighter inventory control.

In conclusion this collaboration between Walmart and Avery Dennison marks a significant step in the evolution of retail food-technology. By bringing RFID into fresh food departments at scale the partners are raising the bar for traceability, stock management and sustainability in grocery retail. As item-level digital identities become embedded in meat, bakery and deli segments we may be witnessing a new era in store-operation intelligence.

See Avery Dennison Press Release

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