Recurring revenue is now 42 per cent of the nine month total

The structural story sits underneath the headline. Recurring revenue reached EUR 32.4 million in the third quarter of 2026, up 17 per cent from EUR 27.8 million a year earlier, and EUR 95.7 million across the first nine months of 2026 against EUR 82.0 million in the same period of 2025, also 17 per cent higher. That makes recurring revenue 42 per cent of total revenue for the nine month period, and it is growing faster than the top line in every one of the four key markets.

“The third quarter reflects continued customer demand for our solutions, with recurring revenue again growing faster than total revenue,” said chief executive Rob Schuurman. “As this base grows, it provides an increasingly strong foundation for sustainable long-term growth and value creation.”

For anyone buying RFID, that percentage is the accounting trace of a change in how these systems are sold. An item level programme used to land as a capital purchase of fixed and handheld readers, tags and a perpetual licence. Increasingly it lands as a subscription, with the software platform, the analytics and often the hardware wrapped into a per store or per site fee, which smooths the supplier’s revenue and moves the buyer’s spend from capex to opex.

Retail adds first time RFID users and takes customers from rivals

Retail revenue increased in the third quarter of 2026 compared with the third quarter of 2025, and the mix of new logos is the detail worth noting: Nedap said it added both retailers adopting RFID for the first time and retailers replacing an existing provider. Nedap’s retail business is built on passive UHF RFID, also marketed as RAIN RFID, which operates in the 860 to 960 MHz band and delivers the read range and bulk read rate needed to count a sales floor and a stockroom in minutes rather than days. A market in which both greenfield adopters and competitive displacements are signing in the same quarter is one where the technology case is settled and the contest has moved on to the software layer.

Use of those deployments is also widening. Nedap said adoption continued to expand beyond inventory counting into automated replenishment, on-shelf availability and overhead inventory visibility, which is the shift from counting stock to acting on the count. Cycle counting answers how many units a store holds. Replenishment, shelf availability and overhead stock visibility answer which units are in the wrong place, and that is where accurate item level data starts paying for itself in sales rather than in stock loss alone.

Nedap’s RFID-enabled self-checkout portfolio also saw its first large-scale deployments in the third quarter of 2026. Reading a basket by RFID instead of scanning each barcode removes the slowest step at the till, although it only works where the whole assortment is reliably tagged, which is why apparel has reached it first.

The largest named retail commitment is with VF Corporation, the US apparel group behind brands including The North Face, Vans and Timberland. The previously announced partnership is the reference point for what Nedap calls its Inventory Engine vision, the idea of a single inventory record that is accurate across stores and the wider supply chain rather than one that stops at the shop door. The planned rollout covers more than 1,500 stores across VF’s brand portfolio and extends to distribution centres and vendor partners to support end to end visibility. Tagging at source and reading at every handover is what lets a retailer treat one stock figure as true from factory to fitting room.

Livestock falls back on timing while healthcare grows

Livestock revenue declined in the third quarter of 2026 against a strong third quarter of 2025, which Nedap attributed mainly to the timing of deliveries and a further shift towards subscription-based offerings. Recurring revenue in that market still rose as adoption of as-a-service offerings grew, and the installed base expanded across multiple regions. Labour scarcity, increasing farm scale and the pressure for efficiency remain the long-term drivers for cow monitoring and automation, which in dairy typically means an ear tag or neck transponder identifying each animal at the feeder, the sorting gate and the parlour.

Healthcare revenue increased in the third quarter of 2026, with Nedap reporting a stronger position in disability care and elderly care and more care organisations adopting its treatment records as professionals and practitioners work within the same record.

Security holds steady as Nedap Pace goes live at Bayer

Security revenue remained broadly stable in the third quarter of 2026. Nedap Pace, the company’s platform for managing physical access across multiple sites, countries and existing access control systems, went live at the first building on the Bayer CropScience Campus in Monheim, part of the crop science division of the German life sciences group Bayer, under Bayer’s AllAccess programme to set a common standard for physical access management. Nedap also introduced Nedap Way, a new reader line for secure building access that supports both card-based and mobile credentials and works with a range of new and existing access control systems, so sites can modernise in stages rather than in one cutover.

Outlook

Nedap expects revenue growth in the second half of 2026 compared with the second half of 2025. Geopolitical instability in the Middle East continues to delay customer rollouts for its security solutions in that region. The company said it will keep investing with particular emphasis on its technology platform, AI and cybersecurity. More retail RFID coverage and further company and financial results are collected on RFID News.

Read more at https://www.nedap.com/en/news/trading-update-q3-2026

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.

Lager 157 was founded in 1999 by Stefan Palm in Gällstad, a village in western Sweden, and sells low-priced own-brand basics across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark, with its first German store opening in Bremen in late 2024. It has grown on product, price and word of mouth rather than advertising, which puts a lot of weight on something very plain: the right size, colour and style being on the shelf when a customer reaches for it.

Why counting a few times a year stops working

Manual stock counts were not keeping up with the pace the business was setting. The pattern will be familiar to anyone running a growing estate of stores. Counts happen a few times a year, the figure is already out of date by the time it is reconciled, and every decision taken in between rests on a number nobody quite trusts.

Three stores, three countries

Between August and October 2025, Lager 157 and ClarityRFID ran Clarity Store, the vendor’s store operations platform, in Naestved in Denmark, Nacka in Sweden and Raisio in Finland. Manual counts were replaced with real-time item-level visibility, and all three stores kept trading normally throughout.

Three markets was a deliberate choice. A single-store pilot proves the software works. Three stores in three countries proves it works against different stock profiles, different store teams and different local processes, which is the question a wider rollout actually turns on.

“The pilot gave us a completely different level of visibility into our stock, down to the individual item. That is exactly the insight we want as we plan our next stores.” Gunnar Palm, Head of Controlling and Business Development, Lager 157.

What the numbers came out at

Stock accuracy reached 98 to 99.8% across the participating stores, and SKU accuracy reached 97%. The two figures are not the same measure: one is how closely the units on hand match the units recorded, the other is how many product lines match exactly, which is the harder test in a business built on sizes and colourways.

Counting also stopped being an event and became a routine, and that is the part that changes behaviour in a store. Once a team can trust the count, replenishment stops being a judgement call, and the conversation moves from what is on the shelf to what should be.

“Lager 157 has built a fast-growing business on getting the basics right for its customers. The pilot showed what item-level inventory visibility can do for a business like theirs.” Michael Quimby, GM, ClarityRFID.

What the pilot sets up

The useful output is a measured baseline rather than a projection, and that is what carries into a wider rollout. The pattern established across the three markets becomes the template for the next set of stores, instead of a one-off exercise that has to be argued from scratch each time a new country is added.

ClarityRFID sells two products: Clarity Supply Chain, which covers RFID auditing in factories and distribution centres, including carton auditing, pack verification, supplier compliance and pallet receiving, and Clarity Store, which covers counting, replenishment, BOPIS and fulfilment, loss prevention, markdowns and store transfers for store teams. The company states 9,000 or more stores across 70 or more countries, says it is hardware agnostic across the major reader manufacturers, and was named a Leader and Top Implementer in ABI Research’s 2025 platform ranking published in the fourth quarter of 2025, placing second of fourteen platforms. SOC 1, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits are described as under way.

More deployments like this one are collected in our case studies and retail sections.

Read more at https://www.clarityrfid.com/lager-157-poc

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.

GreyOrange, which describes itself as the global leader in AI-powered multi-agent warehouse orchestration and store inventory software, sells gStore, a retail application built on item-level RFID. Site Bionics comes at the same shop floor from the opposite direction, taking the security cameras a retailer already has on the ceiling and turning them into what the company calls a live, continuously updated model of the store and the people moving through it. A digital twin, in that sense, is a software copy of a physical space kept in step with the real thing by a constant feed of live data. Combined with gStore’s item-level RFID, GreyOrange says retailers get a single AI-driven view of both the products on the floor and the people interacting with them.

The founders are the most revealing detail in the announcement. Site Bionics was founded by Adam Blair, the founding CTO of RADAR, and Don Gillett, the former Head Architect of Amazon Go. RADAR is a retail technology company whose own platform pairs item-level RFID with computer vision to report where stock is sitting in a store in real time, so Blair arrives at GreyOrange from a direct competitor in precisely the space this deal is meant to open up. Amazon Go was Amazon’s checkout-free convenience store format, opened to the public in Seattle in January 2018, which used ceiling cameras and shelf sensors to bill shoppers for what they picked up on the way out. The Site Bionics team has joined GreyOrange, and the technology goes into gStore first, with plans to extend it into warehouse operations through GreyMatter, GreyOrange’s warehouse orchestration software.

“Adam and Don have spent their careers at the frontier of store intelligence, from item-level RFID to the camera systems behind Amazon Go,” said Akash Gupta, CEO of GreyOrange. “Together, we’re giving retailers the ability to do more with the infrastructure they’ve already invested in. The cameras on their ceilings and the RFID tags on their products become one AI-driven picture of everything happening in the store. That means fewer blind spots, faster decisions, and the insight needed to drive more in-store conversions.”

What the combined system is claimed to do

GreyOrange sets out four things the merged product is meant to deliver. First, a live digital twin of the whole store with no new hardware, showing how shoppers and staff move, where they linger and what they interact with, off the existing cameras. Second, AI that explains what it sees: video-language models, trained on video and text together so they can answer questions in plain words about footage, would let a head office ask “Which stores set up the new display as planned?” instead of scrubbing through hours of recordings. Third, RFID and computer vision in one model, which GreyOrange says yields an in-store sales funnel down to the individual item and automates loss investigations so asset protection teams get faster, fuller reports. Fourth, one system in place of the patchwork of separate inventory, shopper behaviour and loss tools most retailers run today.

On privacy, the company says all tracking is anonymous, video is processed on site, and the system sits behind enterprise-grade security and privacy controls. Those are GreyOrange’s assurances rather than audited findings, and a UK retailer putting camera analytics into a shop still has its own obligations to work through.

A promise that has gone unmet

“For years, this industry has promised retailers that RFID and computer vision would come together and show them the full story of their stores. That promise has gone unmet,” said Adam Blair, Co-Founder of Site Bionics. “Don and I built Site Bionics to solve the computer vision side of that equation. GreyOrange has mastered the RFID side. Together, we’re finally delivering on it.”

That is a fair description of where the market has been, and it is worth being precise about why the join is hard. The two technologies answer different questions. RFID gives you identity: a read returns a unique number that resolves to one specific unit of one specific SKU, and it does that whether the item is on a shelf, in the stockroom or buried under other stock, because it never has to be seen. Cameras give you behaviour: who reached, who lingered, who walked away, all inferred from appearance. Fusing the two at item level means asserting that the number read off a tag and the object a camera watched someone pick up are the same thing, and that assertion is where these systems have historically come apart.

The failure modes are mundane and stubborn. Items disappear from view into bags, baskets and pockets while their tags keep reading. Tags read through walls and shelving from the wrong fixture, or from the next department along, so the inventory record and the camera’s view of the aisle disagree. Overhead reader arrays give wide, continuous coverage but coarse position, while a handheld gives a clean cycle count only when somebody walks the floor with it, so the twin’s freshness varies by zone and by shift. And a shopper who picks up three garments, carries them to a mirror and puts two back has produced one camera sequence and several tag movements that have to be reconciled correctly, or the sales funnel is wrong at exactly the item level the product is sold on. Hiring the team that built the camera side of Amazon Go is a serious answer to that. It is also why the promise Blair describes has gone unmet for as long as it has, and why what matters next is evidence rather than architecture.

“After years of putting cameras to work across industries, I’ve learned that a camera’s real value is in what it measures, not what it records,” said Don Gillett, Co-Founder and CTO of Site Bionics. “Site Bionics brings that thinking to retail, using the cameras already on every store’s ceiling. Paired with gStore’s RFID data, the store’s digital twin knows not just where people are, but what they’re doing with the products around them.”

What the announcement does not include

There is no price, no location given for Site Bionics, no named Site Bionics customer and no third-party measurement of what the camera platform achieved before the deal. Everything quantified belongs to gStore, and the figures are GreyOrange’s own: better than 99% inventory accuracy, position to within 3 to 5 ft with store maps down to aisle and shelf, a 40% lift in on-floor availability, twice the associate productivity and go-live in under four weeks. GreyOrange also says gStore is the only platform supporting both overhead and handheld RFID in a single store. Neither the announcement nor the gStore product material names the radio frequency band the tags use.

The scale behind the claim is real enough. GreyOrange said in early September 2026 that more than 3,800 retail locations run on its technology, and H&M Group has been rolling gStore out across hundreds of its own stores since around September 2026. That is a substantial installed base of item-level RFID to point a camera model at, and it is why the deal is worth following: if the fusion works anywhere at scale, it will show up first in stores that already have both halves of the equation in place. Until a named retailer publishes numbers, this remains an acquisition release with a good argument inside it.

More store-level deployments are covered in our retail section and platforms of this kind in software. Terms used here are explained in the RFID glossary.

Read more at https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/10/08/3377349/0/en/greyorange-accelerates-physical-ai-strategy-with-acquisition-of-site-bionics.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.

Physical-Digital Twins and the Role of RFID

The concept of a “digital twin” has existed in manufacturing and supply chain circles for years. A digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical object, updated in real time with data from sensors, tags, and connected systems. RFID is uniquely suited to anchor this relationship. Each tagged item carries a unique identifier encoded on its RFID inlay, linking it to a corresponding digital asset stored on a cloud platform or blockchain ledger.

When a consumer purchases an RFID-tagged handbag, for instance, the tag’s unique Electronic Product Code (EPC) can be mapped to a 3D-rendered version of that same handbag within a metaverse environment. The owner taps or scans the physical item using an NFC-enabled smartphone, and their digital avatar is instantly equipped with a verified virtual version of the product. The physical tag acts as the authentication key, ensuring the digital twin can only be claimed by the rightful owner of the real item.

Luxury Brands Leading the Way

Luxury fashion houses have been among the first to explore this territory. Several high-profile brands have begun embedding UHF RFID and NFC inlays into garments, footwear, and accessories, not just for supply chain visibility, but as a gateway to exclusive digital content. Some programmes offer holders of tagged limited-edition items access to virtual events, gated online communities, or wearable assets for use in gaming and social platforms.

The appeal is straightforward. For brands, it deepens customer engagement and creates new revenue streams without manufacturing additional physical inventory. For consumers, it transforms a purchase into a multi-layered experience that extends well beyond the shop floor.

Authentication Challenges and Opportunities

One of the most compelling use cases is authentication. Counterfeiting remains a significant concern across luxury goods, pharmaceuticals, and collectibles. RFID-based authentication, where each item’s tag is cryptographically paired with its digital twin, makes forgery significantly harder. A counterfeit item would lack the correctly encoded RFID inlay needed to unlock its virtual counterpart, providing an instant verification mechanism for both brands and buyers.

This model also opens the door to secondary markets. When a tagged item changes hands, the RFID scan can trigger a transfer of digital ownership, creating a transparent chain of provenance that follows the item through its entire lifecycle.

What Comes Next

The metaverse is still evolving, and much of this remains early-stage. But the underlying technology is not speculative. RFID tagging at item level is already deployed at scale in retail, logistics, and healthcare. The infrastructure to support physical-digital linking exists today. What is changing is the demand. As consumers spend more time in virtual environments and expect their physical purchases to carry digital value, the role of RFID as the connective layer between these worlds will only grow.

The brands and technology providers that invest in this integration now will be best positioned when the metaverse moves from novelty to norm.

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 published feature list mixes visual merchandising with in-store technology: an enhanced exterior, a new “river-runway” installation showing runway-inspired looks and current trends, an expanded denim department carrying more silhouettes and washes, larger and modernised fitting rooms, and a revised layout. Two items on that list matter to anyone following retail RFID. The first is “weight-sensing self-service checkouts using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology”. The second is what River Island calls “WW Smart Fitting Rooms”, which let a customer request an alternative size or another product without leaving the cubicle.

Mel Aucott, Retail Director at River Island, said the opening “represents an important step change in River Island’s bricks-and-mortar presence”. Kevin Duffy, Centre Director at centre:mk, said the store “brings something fresh to the destination’s existing quality line up of fashion retailers”.

A concept store, not a first deployment

The launch coverage reads as though RFID has just arrived at River Island. It has not. The retailer has been running item-level UHF RFID across its entire chain since 2017. In November 2016 RFID Journal reported a planned deployment across 280 stores in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium, built on Nedap’s iD Cloud. Nedap is a Dutch technology company whose retail division sells item-level stock management; iD Cloud is its cloud-hosted EPC UHF platform, the passive air interface, also marketed as RAIN RFID, that reads hundreds of garment tags a second at a few metres. Store teams read stock with !D Hand 2 handheld readers paired over Bluetooth to Android devices running the iD Cloud app. Nedap tells us the !D Hand 2 has since left its portfolio and that River Island has since moved to Zebra’s RFD40 handheld.

The tag silicon was specified at the time too. The pilot used Alien Technology Higgs 4 inlays supplied by Byways Group, and the full rollout moved to Impinj Monza R6-P. Alien Technology and Impinj are the two long-established American chip suppliers for passive UHF garment tags. Jon Wright, Head of Global Loss Prevention and Safety at River Island, and Danny Haak, then iD Cloud Product Manager at Nedap Retail, ran a three-month, three-store pilot that returned 97 per cent inventory accuracy, sales above expectation and all three of its KPIs met, with installation following mainly from May to October 2017.

Self-checkout came later and from a different supplier. Keonn, a Barcelona-based RFID hardware manufacturer, published a River Island case study covering its AdvanGo RFID self-checkout and AdvanPay RFID point-of-sale readers: a two-store pilot, then six stores live, then a further 24 scheduled for 2024, with the UK tag specialist Tag Company managing and integrating the solution. Keonn’s stated outcomes were shorter queues, a better shopping experience and greater visibility of a product’s life in store.

River Island has also put numbers on the record itself. Speaking at Retail Technology Show in London on 24 to 25 April 2024, Chief Information Officer Simon Pakenham-Walsh, who joined from Sweaty Betty, said the RFID rollout was complete company-wide, that stock accuracy had improved from roughly 70 per cent to 98 per cent, and that self-checkout had reached 60 per cent adoption across the store network. He also described fitting room screens then in trial, showing a customer what they had tried on and letting them talk to a store associate, which had cut returns by 40 per cent and made customers 50 per cent more likely to buy when they requested extra sizes or products through an associate. He said River Island planned to extend RFID into garment care labels.

The weight-sensing claim deserves a closer look

Set against seven years of existing deployment, the one technically novel line in the centre:mk announcement is weight sensing on an RFID self-checkout, and it is an odd pairing. An RFID self-checkout reads every EPC in the basket or on the pedestal, so the till already knows exactly which items are present without anyone scanning a barcode. Weight verification is what supermarket self-checkouts use precisely because they cannot see what is in the bag: the scale confirms that what was scanned matches what was put down. In fashion, RFID is normally sold as the thing that removes the need for that check.

So either River Island has deliberately added a weight layer on top of the tag read as a shrink control, catching untagged, detagged or mis-tagged items the reader cannot see, which would be a notable piece of loss prevention engineering, or the two capabilities have been conflated somewhere in the press material. No source resolves it. The announcement names no supplier for the checkouts, and while Keonn hardware is in the chain elsewhere, nothing confirms it is the hardware at centre:mk or that weight sensing is part of it. Keonn’s own case study makes no mention of weight sensing at all.

WW Smart Fitting Rooms, with no vendor attached

“WW Smart Fitting Rooms” is the name River Island’s own announcement uses, and it has been repeated across the trade press. No vendor is identified, and “WW” does not map to any RFID or fitting room supplier, which suggests a garble somewhere in the supplied copy. For context, Nedap’s published River Island case study describes iD Cloud integrated with fitting room technology from Crave Retail, an American supplier of connected fitting room software, so that is the integration Nedap documents for the chain. It is not confirmed as the system installed at centre:mk, and it should not be read as an expansion of “WW”.

The vendor silence runs through the whole announcement. Every named supplier in this story, Nedap, Keonn, Tag Company, Crave Retail, Impinj and Alien Technology, comes from older case studies and press coverage about the chainwide estate. None of them appears in the centre:mk launch material.

What the underlying estate has delivered

Nedap’s River Island case study puts hard figures on the installed base, though it names no store count, no reader model and no River Island staff. It reports inventory accuracy above 98 per cent from weekly RFID cycle counts, on-shelf availability raised to over 99 per cent through real-time refill, and a stock reduction of 30 to 40 per cent while holding that availability. On the shop floor, 61 per cent of customers who tried a product on went on to buy it, and 84 per cent of customer assistance requests were handled by store teams within two minutes. Nedap also credits the system with removing the need for additional security measures, which allows hard tags to be dropped in selected stores in support of a seamless self-checkout experience, cutting labour cost and turning stock takes from hours into minutes.

Why a technology-led concept store in 2026

The commercial backdrop explains the timing. River Island announced a restructuring plan in August 2025 that closed 33 UK stores and renegotiated rents at 71 sites. For 2025 it reported a pre-tax profit of £11.6m, against an operating loss of £65.3m in 2024, with gross profit of £94.3m, up from £37m. Ben Lewis returned as Chief Executive and in June 2026 set out plans for new stores across the UK and Ireland alongside digital investment. A 12,800 sq ft concept store built around checkout and fitting room technology is what that plan looks like on the ground.

The thing to watch, as the concept moves into other stores, is whether the weight-sensing layer travels with it and which supplier is behind it. If it does, a chain that has run RFID since 2017 will have decided that reading the tag is no longer sufficient verification at the till, and that is a question for every fashion retailer with an RFID self-checkout programme. More on item-level deployments in retail.

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.

Store counts are the easy part of this story to report and the least interesting part of it. The number that matters sits in the middle of McGrath’s post, and it is the one JD had no power to instruct: over the same fourteen months to September 2026, source tagging across JD’s brand partners rose from around 40% of product to 73%.

The number JD could not mandate

Source tagging means the RFID label or hang tag is applied at the point of manufacture, by the supplier, rather than being stuck on later by the retailer in a distribution centre or a stockroom. For a retailer of JD’s shape it is the only version of item-level tagging that scales. JD is a multi-brand retailer: the shelves carry other companies’ products, made in other companies’ factories, under other companies’ tagging policies. A retailer can buy readers, write software and train staff entirely on its own authority. It cannot order a global sportswear brand to add an inlay to a garment tag at source.

So moving that figure from roughly 40% to 73% was a supply-chain persuasion exercise rather than a technology project, and it is the part of the programme least likely to be repeatable by anyone who assumes the hard bit is the hardware. McGrath’s own framing is that the work was about “changing behaviours, processes and mindsets” rather than “scanners, tags and technology”, and he credits the shift to brand partners increasingly recognising what RFID offers in their own retail formats and supply chains, not to pressure from JD.

That 27% gap is not a rounding error either. It is the ceiling on everything else the programme is being built towards. A store cannot behave as a reliable real-time inventory node if roughly a quarter of the units on its shelves carry no tag at all, because the untagged quarter is invisible to every count, every availability check and every downstream system that consumes the data. Read rates on passive UHF RAIN RFID in apparel and footwear are high enough that the tagged population can be trusted; the untagged population cannot be inferred.

What was actually deployed

The platform underneath the programme is ItemOptix, the RFID inventory management software from Checkpoint Systems, a supplier of retail loss prevention and RFID systems. JD signed a multi-year global software agreement covering its Sports Fashion Group stores, beginning in Europe. Notably, JD’s own IT team integrated the RFID processes into JD’s existing store software using Checkpoint’s ItemOptix SDK, rather than handing colleagues a separate application to learn beside the till system they already used. For a rollout measured in stores per week, that decision matters more than it sounds: it removes an entire category of training and change resistance.

Two other suppliers sit either side of the software, and neither has been named in the coverage of this milestone. Zebra Technologies, the enterprise mobile computing firm whose handheld computers are the default in warehouse and retail scanning, supplied the handheld RFID readers. Renovotec, a UK rugged hardware and mobility integrator, acted as the UK deployment and support partner. Between them they cover the two jobs that quietly sink RFID rollouts, which are getting working hardware into a thousand buildings and keeping it working afterwards.

In the distribution network, JD runs fixed tunnel readers, which are RFID portals mounted over a conveyor that read every tag in a carton as it passes through without anyone handling the goods. The Rochdale site near Manchester in the UK went in first, followed by Heerlen in the Netherlands serving continental Europe, with a stated throughput of up to 540,000 items per hour.

The results that justified all of it came from a deliberately small pilot: five stores in the UK, France and Spain in the second half of 2024, which returned a 12% increase in on-shelf availability, a 20% improvement in restocking speed and a 95% increase in items found. From that proof of concept to a full enterprise rollout took 76 working days, McGrath told Retail Technology Innovation Hub in January 2026. The UK and Ireland leg alone was 414 stores in 16 weeks, a pace of 25 stores a week, supported by a week-long immersive change and culture programme that trained 26 retail Change Champions.

Phase One complete is not rollout complete

It is worth being precise about what has finished, because the headline figures invite a bigger reading than they support. The 1,000 stores are the ones JD directly launched, which in McGrath’s wording covers “everything we directly control”. The wider group number he gives, 2,700 live of 4,800, leaves roughly 2,100 stores outside the programme, largely franchise and brand-partner estates where JD’s operating control is limited or indirect. Reaching 2,700 stores in fourteen months across that many territories is a genuinely large piece of work by any retail standard. It is also, by JD’s own accounting, a bit over half of the group.

Confidence rather than accuracy

What makes the source-tagging figure strategically loaded rather than merely operational is where McGrath says the programme is heading. In a May 2026 Retail Technology Innovation Hub interview he opened with “I hate RFID. Not because it doesn’t work. Not because it isn’t valuable. But because most of the industry is still looking at it through the wrong lens”. His objection is to the measure the sector reports. “Accuracy is a report. Confidence is a decision,” he said, and “what’s the point in being 98% accurate, if an agent can’t trust that last 2%?”

The destination he describes is machine-readable inventory. “Stores stop being places with stock and start becoming real-time, queryable inventory nodes,” he said, and “We’re building infrastructure for machines to trade physical goods.” His summary of the shift is blunt: “RFID isn’t a store ops tool anymore. It’s a confidence engine for agentic commerce”. He also noted that he chose Checkpoint Systems and ItemOptix specifically because it is “a fully serviceable, API first RFID platform”, which is a coherent choice if the long-term consumer of the data is software rather than a store manager.

He is dismissive of where the rest of the sector has its attention: “The industry is still talking about cycle counts”. The uncomfortable implication for anyone agreeing with him is that the agentic-commerce case rests entirely on tag coverage. An API-first platform, tunnel readers at 540,000 items an hour and 2,700 live stores are all necessary and none of them are sufficient while 27% of product arrives untagged.

The question left open

Which brand partners moved, and what moved them, is the part of this programme nobody has published. A jump from roughly 40% to 73% of product in fourteen months implies specific commercial conversations with specific suppliers, and the arguments that worked in those rooms are considerably more valuable to the rest of retail than another set of store counts. The same goes for the remaining 27%. Whether that tail closes through supplier economics, through JD tagging at its own distribution centres as a stopgap, or not at all, is the thing to watch in Phase Two.

Read more at https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7510307314281844736/

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.

Cisper, the Netherlands-based RFID distributor that supplies readers, antennas and tags to customers across Europe and India, spent day one of RAIN in Action handing out branded socks. I have agreed to wear mine on Wednesday 30 September. So if you are in Madrid this week and you spot a pair of unusually trendy socks coming towards you, that will be me. Come and say hello.

RAIN in Action is the annual conference of the RAIN Alliance, the industry body behind UHF RFID built on the Gen2 air interface, and it is running at the Novotel Madrid City Centre from 29 September to 1 October 2026. Day one opened with a networking session, which did exactly what it was supposed to do. It is genuinely good to put faces to a year of email, and there were a lot of them.

Why the world needs RAIN enabled smartphones

The first session I sat in was led by Paul Muller, who leads RAIN Reader Smartphone Integration at the RAIN Alliance, with Steyn Geldenhuys, CTO of Sieveo, and Zoe Venter, product designer at the same company. Sieveo is a German systems integrator in the Utsch group, better known for RAIN RFID in vehicle identification and for DigSig, an approach that lets a tag be verified offline.

The premise was a good one, and it is the most persuasive framing of this argument I have heard.

An online retailer knows almost everything about a visit. Where the customer came from, what they looked at, how long they lingered, which part of the screen their attention went to, the whole path through the site. A physical shop, which is still where most retail happens, knows almost none of it. You know what went through the till. Everything before that is guesswork.

The proposition is that a phone which can read UHF tags closes that gap, and brings customer engagement, loyalty and Digital Product Passports along with it. Put that capability in the customer’s pocket and the shop floor starts producing the kind of data the website has had for twenty years.

I like the argument, these are the types of jobs I have worked on with one of my companies for customer engagement.

The NFC problem

The presentation stated that RFID is not currently enabled in phones. That is not right, and the distinction matters.

Practically every smartphone shipped today contains an RFID reader. It is called NFC, it runs at 13.56 MHz, and it is high frequency RFID. It is how contactless payment works, how a hotel key card works, and how a great many product authentication and engagement campaigns already work. The reader is in the pocket of almost every customer in the shop, right now.

What phones do not have is UHF, the 860 to 960 MHz band that RAIN uses. So the honest version of the claim is not that phones cannot read RFID. It is that phones cannot read this RFID.

Which leaves the real question: what does UHF give you that NFC does not?

There is a decent answer available. Range, for one, since NFC is a touch and UHF is a metre or so. Reading many tags at once rather than one at a time. And the strongest argument by some distance, which is that the UHF tag is already in the garment. It was put there for the supply chain, it survived to the shop floor, and it is the same tag the retailer already paid for. An NFC engagement campaign needs a second tag added for the purpose. A RAIN one does not.

That is the case, and I would have liked to hear it made.

The privacy question, which is not going away

The room raised privacy, and it was the sharpest exchange of the session.

If a phone can read the tags on a person, it can read the tags on a person. Consider a handbag. If a four thousand pound designer bag carries a tag that identifies what it is, then somebody walking behind the owner with the right phone learns that the bag is worth stealing. The tag turns a judgement call into a lookup.

Extend it and it gets less comfortable rather than more. Everything somebody is wearing, read at a metre, by anybody, without their knowledge.

This is a solvable problem. There is real work in the standards on what a tag discloses to an unauthorised reader, and tags can be killed or short-ranged at the point of sale. But it has to be solved before consumer phones ship with UHF readers, not afterwards, and an industry that puts the reader in a billion pockets without answering it first will have the answer written for it by somebody else.

Two practical things

The stated read distance was around one metre. In my experience any quoted read distance should be taken with a pinch of salt. Range on a real deployment depends on the tag, the material behind it, what else is in the room and how much of the customer’s hand is wrapped around the phone. A metre in a demonstration is not a metre in a Tuesday afternoon shop.

Nobody asked about battery. A UHF reader is an active transmitter, and phone makers count milliamps like misers. If putting a RAIN reader in a handset costs meaningful battery life, that is a conversation with Apple and Samsung rather than with our industry, and it is the sort of thing that decides whether any of this ships.

RAIN sensing

The other session worth reporting was the Sensors Working Group, led by Sara Amendola, CEO of Radio6ense, who leads that group for the RAIN Alliance. It was run as an open discussion rather than a formal working group meeting, which was the right decision.

The subject is what happens when a tag reports a condition as well as an identity. Temperature, moisture, strain, whatever the application needs, added to the identification that RAIN already provides. The session covered where the working group has got to, then handed over to members for use cases across healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and retail, and opened up into a discussion of where the market actually needs this, what is blocking adoption, and which applications are worth chasing next.

The invitation was explicit: the group wants new participants and new use cases, and it is looking for cross-collaboration with the other RAIN Alliance working groups. If sensing is relevant to what you build, that is a door being held open.

More tomorrow

A good first day. The smartphones session will stay with me, partly because I disagree with a piece of how it was framed and partly because the underlying argument deserves a better hearing than it got.

We are reporting from Madrid all week. Come and find me and we can talk, and if you cannot spot me, look for the socks.

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 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.

Taken separately these are two vendor announcements timed for RAIN in Action in Madrid, which opens on Tuesday. Taken together they say something more specific: the reader is leaving the dedicated reader.

Gen2X is Impinj’s extension to the Gen2 air interface protocol, which the company describes as standards-compatible and has licensed out to the wider RAIN industry rather than keeping to its own hardware. Zebra was the first licensee. What is new today is the scope, because extending it across handhelds, sleds and fixed readers in one move makes Gen2X the default behaviour of a very large installed base rather than a feature on a flagship.

The performance claims are worth reading closely. Impinj says Gen2X speeds up re-inventorying of a specific tag by up to 100%, which is the mechanism behind finding one item on a rail rather than counting a room. For range, it cites tests by inlay maker Xindeco in which VersaMini tags sitting 3mm from a large metal surface read at over 1.5 metres, more than 50% better than the same tags without Gen2X, and a shelf test across roughly 800 health and beauty products where the number of items inventoried in ten seconds at two metres rose by over 70%.

Those are the numbers that matter for the categories RFID has historically struggled with: small items, dense shelves, liquids and metal. They are also, and this is the part the announcement does not dwell on, vendor-run tests of an Impinj protocol extension using tags from an Impinj partner. Gen2X is not free performance that arrives with a firmware update alone. The gains need Gen2X at both ends, on the reader and on the tag, so a retailer running older inventory will see the reader upgrade and not much else until the tags turn over too. That is a procurement question rather than a technical objection, but it is the question a buyer should ask first.

On the mobile side, the device list is the story. The AMobile Ruby 8 tablet, Bluebird X40, Chainway MC51, Unitech PA768e, UROVO DT610, DT630 and UPad, and Zebra TC501 and TC701 are not a single vendor’s roadmap, they are six manufacturers arriving at the same form factor at once. Behind them sit Qualcomm and MediaTek, and the step that makes the rest possible is Qualcomm’s Dragonwing Q-6690, the first enterprise mobile processor to pull the RAIN reader onto the system on chip itself. We covered what that means in practice when Chainway announced the MC80: no separate reader module, no extra board area, and a device thin enough that people will actually carry it.

That is the shift underneath both announcements. A dedicated handheld reader is a tool an employee picks up to do a task called stocktaking. A smartphone-sized device that happens to read RAIN tags is something they carry all day, which is what makes Impinj’s second use case, continuous passive inventory gathered while staff restock and serve customers, plausible rather than aspirational. It is also why the range figures matter more than the read rate: a device in a pocket does not get pointed at anything.

What neither announcement gives is pricing, and Zebra has not said which firmware versions carry Gen2X on which models or whether any device needs a paid licence to enable it. For anyone running a Zebra estate, that is the practical question, and it is worth asking before Madrid rather than after. Impinj and Zebra are demonstrating Gen2X on Zebra handhelds at the show this week.

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.

C&A is a clothing retailer of European origin, trading in Brazil since 1976 and listed on the São Paulo stock exchange B3 since 2019. As of September 2026 it runs 339 Brazilian stores and employs around 15,000 people there. The format it is rolling out across that estate, called Energia, shows what six years of item-level tagging lets a fashion chain build on top.

The tag layer, laid down in 2020

The project began in June 2020 at the Shopping Tamboré store in Barueri, São Paulo state, with Sensormatic Solutions, a retail loss prevention and inventory intelligence vendor, supplying the tags and software plus consulting, installation, training and project management. The pilot was scoped at ten stores: Tamboré, two in Rio de Janeiro, one in Brasília, one in Belo Horizonte and five more in São Paulo.

The numbers quoted then were the familiar ones for apparel: a read rate of around 250 items per minute, inventory accuracy up to 95%, and lost online sales from abandoned orders cut by up to half. GS1 Brasil, the Brazilian arm of the standards body behind the barcode and the EPC numbering scheme RFID tags carry, wrote the project up in October 2020 and put the ceiling higher, above 98% accuracy per item, the payoff being fewer markdowns and stock exposed to the digital store down to the last unit. C&A had more than 280 stores in Brazil at that point.

No source states a frequency band or air interface for C&A’s tags, and the retailer has not disclosed one. As generic context, reading hundreds of garments a minute and counting a whole shop floor is the application class served by passive UHF RAIN RFID, defined by EPC Gen2 and ISO/IEC 18000-63.

Francislei Donatti, then Vice-President of Commercial Operations at C&A, put the pilot in omnichannel terms. “With this system in our stores, we are achieving much greater accuracy and consequently providing faster responses about product availability,” he said. The commercial logic is a figure C&A cites repeatedly: around 80% of customers entering one of its physical stores say they researched the product online first.

From ten stores to a national programme

Scaling was quick. By September 2021 C&A had 100 stores live on RFID across 125 cities in Brazil, with a target of 200 by the end of that year. Alan Yarschel, Supply Chain Director at C&A, described the aim as pushing stock accuracy above 95% in order to grow e-commerce, and the reported result was that the assortment visible to online customers nearly doubled. Tagging does not add stock. It makes existing stock sellable by making the count trustworthy enough to publish.

Sensormatic said in 2021 that more than 10,000 stores used its RFID solution, and the 2021 coverage cited deployments at Zara, Macy’s, Sears and Lululemon as showing average sales increases of around 10%, the figure that keeps recurring across fashion retail rollouts. Vanessa do Valle, Business Developer Manager at Sensormatic Solutions, had called the direction in 2020, with interest in the firm’s RFID offering up around 40% in the preceding months: “the use of RFID technology should increase substantially soon and become established as a trend in the retail sector.”

What Energia stacks on the tag layer

Energia is where six years of tagging stop being a stock control story. Self-checkout is the obvious beneficiary: an untagged apparel basket has to be scanned garment by garment, which is the job shoppers are worst at, while a tagged basket reads in one pass. Payment sits on top of that, including facial biometric authentication marketed as “pay with a smile” for holders of the C&A Pay digital card, which the retailer says verifies a purchase in seconds.

Fitting rooms carry totems that let a customer request another size or colour without getting dressed again, which only works if the system knows, to the unit and in real time, what is on the floor and in the stockroom. Where nearby stores do not have the item, staff can locate it elsewhere and arrange home delivery.

The C&A app carries the same data into the customer’s hand: scan a product, check real-time availability, locate a specific item inside the store, read reviews, call for staff help and complete the purchase in-app while standing in the shop. In-store product location is the feature that gives the game away. You cannot direct a shopper to a garment you cannot see, and a periodic manual count cannot see it. Retail RFID is usually sold on shrink and accuracy; here it is the addressing system for the shop floor.

The format becomes the standard

The first Energia store opened at Shopping Center Norte in São Paulo’s North Zone on 22 August 2025, around 3,400 square metres over two floors, also by Gensler, with an open shopfront and no display windows, zones for jeans, basics, the ACE sportswear line and the Mindse7 contemporary line, and a cafeteria run with the chain The Coffee. “This new concept crystallises our Energia strategy, providing customers with broader assortment and great product value perception,” said Paulo Correa, CEO of C&A Brasil, who added that it would be tested for several months before becoming the official model for refits and new stores in 2026. C&A operated over 300 Brazilian stores at that point.

The test became the rollout. At the BarraShopping reopening on 9 August 2026 the company had 26 stores in the city of Rio, 47 across the state and three units nationally on the format. Two more followed in September 2026: Butantã Shopping in western São Paulo, managed by Carrefour Property, opened on Thursday 20 September at over 1,500 square metres with Click and Collect and self-checkout, taking the chain to 176 stores in the Southeast region and 50 in the city of São Paulo, and a store of over 1,300 square metres opened at the Iguatemi mall in São José do Rio Preto on 22 September 2026.

The open question about paying with a smile

The biometric element deserves more scrutiny than the launch coverage gave it. “Pay with a smile” is facial recognition in a shop, and facial geometry is biometric data. Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados, the LGPD, in force since 2020, treats biometric data as sensitive personal data, with narrower lawful bases than ordinary personal data and, in most commercial cases, a requirement for specific and highlighted consent.

Nothing in the reporting suggests C&A handles this improperly. What the reporting does not do is say how enrolment works: whether a C&A Pay cardholder opts in explicitly and separately, what becomes of the facial template, where it is stored, how long it is kept and how consent is withdrawn. Those answers decide whether a feature like this is a convenience or a compliance problem, and none of the coverage of the Energia stores addresses them. An RFID tag identifies a garment. A face identifies a person.

Tags as substrate, not as a stock tool

Most RFID coverage in apparel stops at accuracy and shrink, because that is where the business case is easiest to write. C&A Brasil shows what happens after that case is won. The 2020 Tamboré pilot was sold on inventory accuracy and abandoned online orders; six years on, the same tag data lets a shopper check a size from the fitting room, find a rail from a phone and leave through a self-checkout without staff touching the garments. For anyone weighing a first garment tagging pilot, the question is not what accuracy figure the tags deliver next year, but what the business can build in 2032 because the data exists.

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.

Cooperatie Hoogstraten, based in the Antwerp province, coordinates more than 1,000 growers who collectively produce around 45,000 tonnes of strawberries each year. Managing that volume while maintaining strict food safety standards and minimising waste has always been a significant challenge. Traditional barcode-based tracking could not keep pace with the speed and scale of the operation, particularly during peak harvest months when throughput at the cooperative’s distribution centre reaches its highest levels.

The cooperative turned to RAIN RFID, selecting passive UHF tags operating in the 860-960 MHz range. Each reusable plastic crate used in the harvest and distribution process is fitted with an embedded RAIN RFID inlay. As crates move through the supply chain, fixed RFID readers at key waypoints capture tag data automatically, without requiring line-of-sight scanning or manual intervention.

At the farm level, growers register each crate as it is filled, linking the tag’s unique identifier to the specific plot, harvest date, and grower. When crates arrive at the cooperative’s central sorting and packing facility, portal-mounted readers log every inbound shipment in real time. The system tracks each crate through quality inspection, cold storage, and onward dispatch, building a complete digital record of the product’s journey.

This level of traceability has brought tangible improvements to food safety compliance. In the event of a quality concern or recall, Cooperatie Hoogstraten can now trace any batch back to the individual grower and harvest date within seconds rather than hours. That speed is critical when dealing with perishable goods where delays can mean the difference between a targeted withdrawal and a broad, costly recall.

The RFID deployment has also strengthened cold chain integrity. By correlating crate-level tracking data with temperature logs from the facility’s monitoring systems, the cooperative can verify that strawberries have remained within safe temperature ranges throughout handling and storage. Any break in the cold chain is flagged immediately, allowing staff to intervene before product quality is compromised.

From a sustainability perspective, the move to RFID-tagged reusable crates has reduced the cooperative’s reliance on single-use packaging. The system tracks crate lifecycles, flagging units that are due for cleaning or replacement and ensuring that the pool of reusable assets is managed efficiently. Fewer lost or unaccounted-for crates means less waste and lower replacement costs.

Retailers receiving Cooperatie Hoogstraten’s strawberries benefit from the system as well. Delivery verification is faster and more accurate, with RFID-enabled dock doors confirming shipment contents automatically on arrival. Stock accuracy at the store level has improved, and the digital traceability record gives retailers confidence in the provenance of the fruit they are selling to consumers.

The project demonstrates that RAIN RFID is well suited to the demands of fresh produce logistics, where speed, accuracy, and traceability are not optional extras but operational necessities. For Cooperatie Hoogstraten, the investment has delivered measurable gains in efficiency, food safety, and sustainability across the entire strawberry supply chain.

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.

H&M, formally Hennes & Mauritz, is the Swedish retailer that is one of the largest apparel chains in the world by store count. It has been shifting to RFID-tagged stock for years: GS1 UK records a 2018 rollout across 1,800 stores in 12 markets, with more planned for 2019, while noting that H&M has never published the results of those trials. Shenzhen Chainway Information Technology is a Chinese manufacturer of RFID readers, handheld computers and data-capture hardware.

The problem is the halfway point, not the endgame

The difficulty Chainway describes will be familiar to any retailer partway through a tagging programme. H&M stores handle a mixed estate of stock. Most apparel carries a UHF tag, but some items are still barcode-only, and tags in the field get damaged, obscured or torn off. Handling both conventionally means two devices on the counter, two workflows for the cashier and a transaction that can stall when a tag will not read.

Chainway names three pressures behind the deployment: the hybrid item environment itself, queue congestion at peak trading hours caused by item-by-item barcode scanning, and the continuity risk of relying on RFID alone when a tag is unreadable.

What the SR160 actually is

The SR160 is a desk-format scanner built around Chainway’s own UHF module. Chainway’s published specification lists support for the EPCglobal Class 1 Gen 2 air interface, also known as ISO 18000-6C, plus Impinj’s proprietary Gen2X extensions, an adjustable read range of 7 cm to 100 cm with 30 cm given as the recommended working distance, and USB, RS-232 or Bluetooth connection to a host. It is supported on Windows, Linux and macOS.

Impinj’s own write-up of the device, published in May 2023, identifies the reader chip as the E310 and describes the practical point of the design: the scanner toggles between three modes, barcode only, RAIN RFID only, or hybrid, at the push of a button rather than through a software change. If you are new to the terminology, Gen2, RAIN RFID and UHF are covered in our RFID glossary.

The workflow at the till

According to the case study, each checkout counter at the participating stores was fitted with one SR160 wired or paired to the existing POS terminal. The cashier places tagged items within the reader’s sensing field and the SR160 identifies them together, passing the product data to the POS for billing. Where an item fails to register because its tag is damaged, missing or unreadable, the cashier scans the printed barcode with the same device. Chainway describes this as an RFID-first, barcode-backup workflow, and stresses that no additional hardware or process redesign was needed at the point of sale.

The numbers, and whose numbers they are

Every performance figure in this deployment is Chainway’s, published in Chainway’s marketing of its own product. H&M has not published its own account of the trial, and the case study names no country, no number of stores and no individual, describing the sites only as selected high-volume stores. Read the figures on that basis. After several months of operation Chainway reports checkout time reduced by up to 80 per cent versus barcode-only scanning, missed or duplicated scan errors down by more than 70 per cent, one SR160 replacing two separate scanners at each counter, less device switching for staff, higher customer satisfaction scores, and better consistency between sales and inventory data because both RFID and barcode reads feed the same POS record.

That last point is the least headline-friendly and probably the most durable. A store running two scanning systems in parallel tends to end up with two versions of what it sold. Feeding both read types through one device and one data path is what makes real-time stock visibility survive the transition period, which for most retail chains is measured in years rather than months.

Read more at https://chainway.net/Cases/Info/243

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.

Current Per-Unit Pricing by Tag Type

Passive UHF RFID tags, the workhorses of retail and supply chain applications, now sit comfortably in the range of $0.04 to $0.08 per unit at moderate volumes. For high-volume orders above 10 million units, pricing falls closer to $0.03. RAIN RFID inlays from major manufacturers such as Impinj, NXP, and Alien Technology have driven these numbers down through aggressive chip-level optimisation and thinner antenna designs.

HF tags, commonly used in library systems, ticketing, and pharmaceutical tracking, generally cost between $0.08 and $0.15 per unit. NFC tags, which share the 13.56 MHz frequency band with HF but add smartphone interoperability, land in a similar range, typically $0.07 to $0.20 depending on memory size and form factor.

Active RFID tags remain significantly more expensive, ranging from $5 to $25 per unit. Their onboard power source and longer read range make them suitable for high-value asset tracking, but the price point limits deployment to scenarios where the cost is justified by the value of the item being tracked.

Volume Tiers and Chip Pricing Trends

Volume remains the strongest lever for reducing per-tag cost. At quantities below 100,000, expect to pay a premium of 30% to 50% above the baseline. Between 1 million and 10 million units, prices typically settle at or near the published averages. Above 50 million units, buyers can negotiate custom pricing that pushes passive UHF inlays toward the $0.02 mark.

On the chip side, IC vendors have been shrinking die sizes steadily. Smaller silicon means more chips per wafer, and that translates directly into lower unit cost. The Impinj M800 series, for example, pushed performance higher while keeping the die compact enough to support aggressive pricing at scale. NXP’s UCODE 9 family has followed a similar approach, focusing on read sensitivity improvements without inflating the bill of materials.

The Path to Sub-Penny Tags

The RFID industry has talked about the sub-penny tag for over a decade. In 2026, it is closer than ever but still not quite here for general production. Printed electronics and conductive ink antenna technologies continue to mature, with companies like PragmatIC Semiconductor and Wiliot exploring ultra-thin, flexible ICs that could eliminate the need for traditional silicon entirely. If these approaches reach volume production with acceptable yield rates, the $0.01 barrier could fall within the next three to five years.

For that to happen, the entire supply chain needs to align. Substrate costs, converting processes, and quality assurance all add to the final tag price beyond just the chip and antenna. Achieving sub-penny pricing will require not only cheaper components but also faster, higher-yield manufacturing lines.

How Cost Trajectory Affects Adoption

Every time the per-tag cost drops by even a fraction of a cent, it opens up new use cases that were previously uneconomical. Item-level tagging in grocery and fast-moving consumer goods, for example, only becomes viable when tags cost less than a few cents each. The current pricing has already unlocked widespread adoption in apparel retail, where companies like Zara and Decathlon have tagged billions of individual garments.

As costs continue to fall, expect to see RFID expand into packaging, postal services, waste management, and food traceability at scales that dwarf current deployments. The cost curve is bending in the right direction, and 2026 marks a tipping point where the economics finally work for a much broader range of applications.

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.

CEP technology sits between raw RFID data streams and business applications, continuously analysing incoming events to detect meaningful patterns in real time. Rather than storing reads and querying them after the fact, a CEP engine evaluates rules against a live data flow. When a pattern matches, it triggers an action immediately. For RFID deployments that rely on UHF or RAIN RFID readers spread across multiple zones, this capability transforms passive data collection into an active decision-making layer.

Detecting Patterns Across Multiple Readers

In most RFID installations, tagged items pass through several read points on their journey. A pallet might be scanned at a dock door, again inside a sorting area and once more at a shipping lane. A CEP engine correlates these separate observations into a single logical event, confirming that the pallet followed the expected route. If the engine detects a tag at the shipping lane without a prior read at the sorting area, it can flag the anomaly instantly and alert warehouse staff before the pallet leaves the building.

This cross-reader pattern detection is especially valuable in logistics and retail, where items must follow defined workflows. By modelling the expected sequence of read events, CEP engines turn scattered tag data into reliable process verification.

Time-Windowed Aggregation

Not every RFID event deserves a response. Readers routinely pick up the same tag dozens of times within a few seconds, and environmental factors such as metal shelving or liquid containers can cause ghost reads. CEP engines handle this through time-windowed aggregation, grouping events that fall within a defined interval and applying filters before passing results downstream.

A typical rule might state: "If tag X is observed by reader Y more than three times within a five-second window, register one confirmed presence event." This deduplication reduces noise dramatically, lowering the processing burden on downstream systems while improving data accuracy. Time windows can also be used to detect absence. If an expected read does not occur within a set period, the engine can generate a missing-item alert, which is critical for high-value asset tracking.

Triggering Business Actions in Real Time

The real power of CEP becomes clear when pattern detection feeds directly into business workflows. A confirmed shipping event can automatically update an ERP system, generate an advance shipping notice and notify the customer that their order is on its way. A detected exception can pause a conveyor, create a trouble ticket or send a push notification to a supervisor’s handheld device.

Because CEP engines process events with sub-second latency, these actions happen while the situation is still actionable. In cold-chain logistics, for example, an RFID sensor tag that reports a temperature excursion can trigger an immediate rerouting decision rather than a retrospective quality review. In retail, a sudden surge of tag reads at a fitting room entrance can prompt staff allocation in near real time.

Choosing the Right CEP Approach

Several open-source and commercial CEP platforms support RFID workloads, including Apache Flink, Esper and proprietary middleware from major RFID solution providers. The choice depends on throughput requirements, the complexity of the event rules and how tightly the engine must integrate with existing infrastructure. Whatever the platform, the principle remains the same: analyse at the speed of the event, not at the speed of the report.

For organisations investing in large-scale RFID, adding a CEP layer is no longer optional. It is the difference between collecting data and acting on it.

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.

As the first phase, the chain plans to complete deployment at all of its stores during fiscal 2026, the Japanese business year ending 31 March 2027. Animate gave two reasons: more efficient store operations, and a better buying experience for customers.

Animate has framed the work as a first step towards wider reform of the industry, according to the Japanese trade paper The Bunka News, which reported the announcement. Most of that report sits behind a paid-member paywall, so the full wording of the remarks attributed to chief operating officer Jun Fujiki is not publicly available.

Why a chain of this size matters

Animate opened its first flagship in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, in 1983 and was incorporated in July 1987. It listed 118 shops in Japan as of 2026, alongside branches elsewhere in Asia and in the United States and London, and it sits inside the Animate Group with the merchandise publisher Movic. Committing every Japanese branch to item-level tagging makes this one of the larger retail RFID programmes the country’s book trade has taken on.

What BOOKTRAIL is

BOOKTRAIL is a book traceability system built on individually identifiable RFID tags attached to books. It makes distribution status visible along the chain and, for the shops that adopt it, gives real-time location, movement history and stock position. PubteX sells that as the basis for shelf and stock management, faster stocktakes, theft prevention and better decisions about where a title sits in the shop.

PubteX itself is a Tokyo company founded on 11 March 2022 and capitalised at 450 million yen, set up specifically to apply AI and IoT to structural problems in Japanese publishing distribution. Its shareholder list explains why the tags are spreading: the trading house Marubeni holds 34.8 per cent, Marubeni Forest Links 16.3 per cent, and three of Japan’s largest book and manga publishers, Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan, 16.3 per cent each. BOOKTRAIL went into commercial service on 29 January 2025.

The tag goes in at the printing plant

The part that will interest anyone who has costed a retail tagging project is that the shops do not apply the tags. This is source tagging taken to its logical end: the tag goes in at the printing plant, so books ship with it already inside.

The mechanics were set out publicly on 7 July 2025, when the publishers Futabasha and Takeshobo announced with PubteX that they would begin inserting PubteX-supplied tags into target titles. The tag is a bookmark-type insert, tucked into the centre of the book or near the spine. Futabasha’s Action Comics line, handled through the magazine distribution route, was covered from August 2025, and a selection of Takeshobo comics, also handled as magazines, from July 2025.

The tag holds a random ID and nothing else. No product-linked information is written to it and no personal data is collected through it, which answers the obvious privacy question about a chip that leaves the shop inside a book. Once the book is sold, the tag is normally disposed of as ordinary household waste under local rules.

The guidance issued to bookshops was deliberately dull: handle stock as normal, sell as normal, do not remove the tag, and keep scanning the existing ISBN or book JAN barcode at the till. One point is worth flagging for anyone running EAS alongside RFID. The RFID tag will not set off a shop’s existing EAS gates, because the two systems work on different radio frequencies. If an EAS label is stuck directly over the RFID tag, though, the two can interfere and the RFID tag may fail to read, so EAS labels should not be placed on top of it.

From 66 shops to a chain-wide commitment

BOOKTRAIL was live in 66 bookshops as of 16 December 2025, and PubteX expected the count to reach 115 by 31 March 2026. Thirteen publishing companies were applying tags at that point, with subsidies and grants used to support adoption. Set against those figures, adding every Animate branch in Japan is a material jump in installed base, not another single-site pilot.

There is also an early result from inside Animate itself. At the Animate Omiya store, RFID lets staff identify exactly which item triggered the anti-theft gate and the precise time it happened. That turned security camera review from an average of one to two hours of footage into one to two minutes. It is the sort of number that moves a loss prevention business case, converting a vague deterrent argument into recovered staff hours.

Elsewhere in the programme, Maruzen Junkudo bookstores ran a data trial on comic shelving, reporting on end-cap and wall shelf performance, and the Maruzen Ochanomizu store put tagged stock through self-checkout.

The structural problem behind the tags

Japanese book distribution runs on a consignment model in which unsold copies travel back up the chain, and the resulting returns rate is why RFID is being pushed here at all. Books shipped in Japan in calendar 2025 came back at a rate of 31.9 per cent, according to Research Institute for Publications figures reported in January 2026. Roughly a third of everything printed makes the journey twice and earns nothing.

PubteX describes its own problem set as falling bookshop numbers, high returns, rising shipping costs and shoplifting losses, and is attacking it on two fronts: AI models tuned to how individual titles sell, to cut wasteful reprinting and returns, and RFID for visibility in the physical chain. Jun Watanabe became its representative director and president in January 2025.

The same tags, pointed at the shopper

Tags fitted for distribution reasons are already being tried on the customer-facing side. At Niconico Chokaigi 2026, held on 25 and 26 April 2026 at Makuhari Messe Hall 4, KADOKAWA ran an RFID and smart shelf corner using the same IC tag technology now going into comics. Lifting a tagged book off a sensor-equipped shelf triggered a promotional video on a monitor, and buying an eligible tagged book entered visitors into a prize draw. PubteX supplied the RFID technology and TOPPAN Corporation the smart shelf system. The same booth showed an Unlimited Bookshelf concept, letting a customer search stock and order titles the shop does not hold.

What has not been said

One detail is missing from every public statement reviewed for this article: none states the frequency band or air interface standard the BOOKTRAIL tags use. The EAS note confirms only that RFID and EAS differ, which says nothing about the band. Until PubteX publishes it, BOOKTRAIL is best described as item-level RFID and no more specific than that.

The other open question is the 2029 target itself. Getting tags into every store during fiscal 2026 is a supply and installation problem. Reaching RFID-based store operations by April 2029 means goods receiving, shelf management, stocktaking, the till and the gate all running off the tag rather than the barcode, across more than a hundred shops. The gap between those two milestones is where retail RFID programmes are won or lost.

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.

GreyOrange is a US headquartered warehouse and retail automation company, known first for its GreyMatter fulfilment orchestration software and the mobile robots that run under it. Its retail product, gStore, is a store inventory and fulfilment platform that ingests RFID reads alongside sales data to hold a live picture of what is on the shop floor and what is in the stockroom. H&M Group is the Swedish fashion retailer behind H&M, COS, Arket and Weekday, and operates in the region of 4,000 stores worldwide.

Read the 3,800 figure carefully

That last number matters, because the headline figure is easy to misread and several syndications of the announcement have misread it. The 3,800 locations are GreyOrange’s total installed base across every customer it has, not H&M’s store estate. H&M Group’s own footprint on the platform is described only as “hundreds of retail locations spanning three continents”, plus GreyMatter orchestration across multiple distribution centres. Because H&M runs roughly 4,000 stores in total, 3,800 sits close enough to look like a full chain rollout. It is not one.

GreyOrange’s other figures give a better sense of scale: roughly 200 million retail inventory items under management through gStore, more than one billion US dollars of inventory moving through its systems each month, and 130,000 hardware and software agents across stores and warehouses globally, 100,000 of them added in the two years to September 2026. All are vendor supplied and unaudited, and “agents” is GreyOrange’s own unit covering everything from a robot to a software process, so it is not comparable to a reader count.

Overhead readers change what inventory accuracy means

The technical substance here is the shift from periodic to continuous reading, and the two approaches produce numbers that look alike and behave nothing alike. Handheld UHF RFID cycle counting is the established method in fashion retail: an associate walks the floor with a handheld reader, sweeps the fixtures and produces a count. It is fast, cheap in capital terms, and accurate on the day it is done. But it is a snapshot. From the moment the count finishes, every sale, every return and every garment carried into a fitting room and abandoned there degrades it, and in a busy store that decay is measured in hours. Counting weekly means working from data that is usually several days old.

Fixed overhead readers mounted in the ceiling read the same tags continuously, so the output is a rolling state rather than a count. That supports tasks such as “this fixture is empty now” instead of “this SKU was short on Tuesday”. GreyOrange has claimed since January 2024 that gStore with overhead reading holds item level inventory accuracy at around 99%, against roughly 90% for traditional point in time cycle counting, and locates items to within three to five feet. That precision is enough to say which fixture or zone an item is in. It is not enough to say which peg, and any deployment plan assuming otherwise will disappoint.

gStore is sensor agnostic, using hardware from suppliers such as Zebra and Keonn rather than a reader line of its own. The economics split cleanly too: overhead arrays suit high volume stores where continuous data pays for the ceiling infrastructure, while handhelds remain the sensible choice for lower volume sites. That is why the largest chains are going overhead first, and it is the same pattern visible in other overhead deployments reported during 2026.

The Zebra tie-up did the groundwork

The September 2026 milestone follows an announcement on 8 January 2026 in which GreyOrange and Zebra combined Zebra’s SmartLens overhead RFID hardware with the gStore execution platform. Overhead readers gather item level data continuously, gStore processes the reads in real time, identifies stock gaps and pushes tasks to associates on mobile devices, removing manual cycle counts and replacing reactive replenishment with scheduled work.

Two details there matter more than the headline. The combined system integrates with a retailer’s existing handheld RFID infrastructure rather than replacing it, which counts for a lot when most chains considering overhead reading have already spent years building handheld estates and tagging programmes. And the first deployment, at an unnamed national fashion retailer, reached 98% on shelf availability. That is a strong figure, but on shelf availability and inventory accuracy are different measurements, and one unnamed site is not a trend.

Troy Siwek, General Manager of gStore by GreyOrange, framed the problem as latency rather than data volume, saying retailers “don’t struggle because they lack data”, but because “they can’t act on it fast enough.” That is a fair description of where item level RFID has stalled in a lot of stores: the tags are on the garments, the reads are happening, and the resulting exception list never reaches anyone with time to walk the floor.

A warehouse relationship that grew into a store one

This is not a new partnership, which is how some coverage has framed it. H&M Group first deployed GreyMatter at a distribution centre on the US West Coast in 2021, and the store side came later. That sequence is the more interesting part of the story: a fulfilment automation supplier working from the back of the network towards the shop floor, which is the direction of travel for several vendors in this space.

Akash Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of GreyOrange, credited H&M with shaping the product rather than simply buying it, citing its “scale, operational complexity, and willingness to co-develop the future of omnichannel technology rather than simply adopt it”. David Pino, Head of Emerging Technology at H&M Group, said scaling successfully requires “specialized understanding of how stores, fulfillment operations and inventory flows work together”. Those are the quotes a press release produces, but the underlying claim, that this took five years and started in a warehouse, is checkable.

Continuous reading creates its own problem

Reading tags all day rather than once a week surfaces a difficulty handheld counting largely hides: readers do not respect the boundaries retailers care about. Stockroom stock reads as shop floor stock, a fitting room reads as a fixture, and an adjacent department’s tags bleed into a zone they do not belong to. In an open plan store that is the normal condition, not an edge case, and it is what stands between a continuous read stream and a count anyone will act on.

GreyOrange’s answer is SoftFence, announced in October 2024, a virtual shielding layer tuned per site that uses received signal strength, signal movement and angle of arrival to judge whether a tag genuinely sits inside the zone being read. Its initial focus was stray tags confusing associates during omnichannel shipping and receiving with handhelds, but the same physics applies to ceiling mounted arrays. That a vendor with this installed base needed a dedicated product for it says plainly that zone discipline, not raw read rate, is the hard engineering problem in overhead retail RFID.

Where this leaves the category

GreyOrange’s other named retail customer is Fabletics, which deployed gStore in August 2025. Keonn is named as an RFID hardware and smart mirror partner, Cognizant as a retail concept partner. Reporting by Chain Store Age on 1 September 2026 adds that gStore combines RFID reads with sales data and smart mirror interactions to build real time inventory heat maps, the same data used to flag fast moving SKUs, garments abandoned in fitting rooms and low stock alerts. The customer outcomes GreyOrange has published, a 45% productivity improvement, a 5% sales increase and 60% more daily customer assistance, all come from unnamed sites, and the accuracy numbers quoted across retail RFID have a long history of travelling without their baselines.

What is solid is the installed base. A category that was still pilot shaped five years ago now has a supplier claiming 3,800 live stores and a global fashion group running it across three continents. The open question for 2027 is whether continuous overhead reading becomes the default in high throughput fashion stores or settles as a top tier option while handhelds carry the long tail. That will turn less on reader performance than on whether retailers can restructure store labour around a task list that never stops updating, a change to how a rollout is run rather than to the technology in the ceiling.

More: retail RFID, fashion RFID, and our guide to implementing RFID for stock control and retail inventory.

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 the face of it that is a merchandising story rather than an RFID one. It is worth a second look. An electronic shelf label, or ESL, is a battery powered e-paper display with a radio on board, individually addressed from a central price system. An estate of 1.2 million of them is an estate of 1.2 million wireless endpoints on UK shelf edges, and on this particular label family there is an optional passive high frequency tag sitting alongside the radio.

What is actually on the shelf edge

The hardware comes from VusionGroup, the French listed retail digitalisation business formerly known as SES-imagotag, which says it serves more than 350 large retailer groups across Europe, Asia and North America. Asda has standardised on the 2.6 inch VUSION shelf edge label, one of the common sizes across the V100 and V300 series, so the model chosen sits in the mainstream of that range rather than at either extreme. Grocery Gazette reported better screen quality and readability as a factor in the choice.

Price data does not reach those labels over shop Wi-Fi. The VUSION family communicates on a proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol, bidirectional, using up to 11 channels, with radio coverage of roughly 25 metres from an in-store access point and 128-bit AES encryption with secure key exchange. Because the link is two way, a label confirms what it has been sent, which is how a retailer can be confident that the price on the shelf matches the price at the till. Each label also carries a blinking LED pick-to-light function, used for picking and for locating stock on a shelf.

Where NFC comes into it

That 2.4 GHz link is proprietary radio and not RFID in the sense most readers of this site use the word. The NFC option is a different matter. SES-imagotag labels can be ordered with an integrated passive NFC tag that complies with ISO 14443 and operates at 13.56 MHz, the standard HF RFID band. ISO 14443 is the four part international standard for proximity cards and their reader interface at that frequency, and it is the same air interface used by contactless bank cards and transit tickets, with a working range of a few centimetres.

Tap an NFC capable phone on a label that has the chip fitted and it redirects to https://nfc.ses-imagotag.com/<Label-ID>, so the tag resolves to that individual label’s identity rather than to a generic product page. Antenna position varies with label size, so the phone has to be lined up with the antenna rather than waved at the display in general. VusionGroup’s own product material pitches the shopper use case directly, describing labels that can be tapped or scanned to reach product reviews, nutritional scores, stock availability in nearby stores or alternative formats online.

One caveat matters here, and it is the honest way to report it. Neither Asda nor VusionGroup has stated publicly whether the NFC chip is populated in the specific 2.6 inch units Asda has deployed. The tag is a documented option on this label family, not a confirmed feature of this rollout. What the rollout does establish is the scale of the opportunity: a UK retailer specifying that option across an estate of this size would put an HF tag population in the millions onto shelf edges in a single programme. Further background on the technology sits in our NFC coverage.

What the labels do for the stores

The displays carry pricing, unit cost, weight and promotional information, and they also show ingredient and allergen information for customers, with expanded detail on bakery items where that has historically been awkward to print at the shelf edge. The operational case is the removal of manual repricing.

Matt Harrison, Director of Asda Express Central Operations, said in the September 2026 announcement: “By removing manual pricing tasks, we’re freeing up time for colleagues to focus on serving customers and keeping store standards high.” Roy Horgan, UK and Ireland CEO at VusionGroup, said the company was “proud to have reached this milestone with Asda” and expected to build on the partnership.

This is the end of a staged programme rather than a single push. An earlier phase announced on 3 October 2025 covered 250 Express stores at roughly 2,800 labels per store, more than 700,000 digital shelf displays in total. That phase followed a three month trial at Oxford Road in Manchester, with Castleford the first new-build Express to open with labels fitted from day one, and 20 further Express stores due to open before the end of 2025 with the labels in place at launch.

Who delivered it, and why the store count varies

Renovotec, a UK integrator specialising in rugged mobile computing and RF infrastructure, handled delivery and installation. HL Display supplied the rails and holders that physically carry the labels on shelves, baskets, hooks, chillers and freezers, an attachment supplier rather than a technology partner. Retail Technology Innovation Hub, reporting on 30 August 2026 from a LinkedIn post about the project, named a wider supplier list, adding Elecomm, MADIC UK and Evolve on infrastructure, with Daniel Pelissier as project lead.

That RTIH report puts the figure at more than 550 sites rather than 517, because it counts the Asda petrol station estate as well as the Express stores. The two numbers are counting different things rather than contradicting each other: 517 is the Express store figure in Asda’s own announcement. Anthony McCarron, Projects, Propositions and Communications Manager at Asda, described the work as a step change for customers and colleagues, delivered on time and on budget.

Cameras are the next layer

Asda is separately piloting shelf-edge availability cameras in five of its larger main-estate stores. The system identifies gaps, out-of-stocks, low inventory and misplaced products and alerts colleagues to replenish, with a wider rollout planned. That is the computer vision half of the VusionGroup stack, which alongside the labels themselves includes VusionCloud, Captana for computer vision and AI, Memory for data analytics, Engage for retail media and PDi digital signage. For an RFID audience the point is the direction of travel: shelf level identity and shelf level sensing are converging on the same infrastructure.

The wider UK picture

Asda is not alone. Waitrose announced a partnership with SOLUM in December 2025 to introduce electronic shelf labels nationwide, and Co-op has been replacing labels across 2,400 stores through 2026. Between them, UK grocery is quietly building one of the largest deployed populations of addressable, powered devices at the shelf edge anywhere in retail, with an HF tag option available on at least one of the major platforms.

Read more at https://corporate.asda.com/newsroom/2025/03/10/asda-rolls-out-new-electronic-shelf-label-across-express-stores

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.

That is the whole of it. The tag is deliberately stupid, because stupid is cheap and cheap is what lets a retailer put one on every coat in the building. Which raises the more interesting questions. What is inside that plastic, why does the pin never pull out, why do the gates sometimes beep at the wrong person, and what actually happens if you get home and find one still attached? Let us follow a single tag from the factory floor to your kitchen table.

The tag goes on before the shop ever sees it

Twenty years ago a stockroom assistant clipped tags on by hand. Today most large retailers use source tagging: the tag is fitted at the factory or the distribution centre, so the garment reaches the shop floor already protected, and no rail of untagged stock ever sits out on display.

What you are looking at is called electronic article surveillance, or EAS. That name matters, because EAS is a completely different thing from the technology most people assume is involved. It came out of the 1960s, long before anything digital was cheap, and it has barely changed since, because it does not need to.

What is actually inside the plastic

Crack one open, which you should not do, and you will find something disappointingly simple. There are two competing designs on British high streets.

The first is radio frequency, or RF, and it is a flat coil of wire connected to a small capacitor, which is a component that stores a little electrical charge. Together they form a circuit tuned to resonate at 8.2 megahertz. Think of it as a tuning fork for radio waves. Hit it with the right frequency and it sings back.

The second is acousto-magnetic, or AM, and it is more elegant. Inside is a strip of alloy that physically vibrates in a magnetic field, next to a magnetised strip that sets the pitch. The gates send a pulse at 58 kilohertz, then go quiet and listen. The strip rings on for a few milliseconds after the pulse stops, like a struck bell, and the gate hears it in the silence. Because it listens in the gap rather than through its own transmission, AM shrugs off interference that would swamp RF, which is why supermarkets use it. RF is cheaper and dominates fashion.

Neither type carries an identity. Every RF tag in Britain is tuned to the same 8.2 megahertz. Every AM tag rings at the same 58 kilohertz. The gate cannot tell a jumper from a jacket from a bottle of gin. It knows one thing: something live went past.

Why the pin will not come out

The pin pushed through the fabric is held by a ball clutch, a tiny cone containing three or four steel ball bearings pressed inward by a spring. Push the pin in and the balls roll aside. Pull it back and they wedge tighter, exactly like a cable tie. Brute force will not open it, it will only tear the garment, which is rather the point.

The detacher pad on the counter is a very strong permanent magnet, usually neodymium, that pulls the ball bearings outward against their spring so the pin slides free. Standard tags release at around 12,000 gauss, and retailers plagued by stolen detachers move to stronger locks. When an assistant thumps a tag against the pad twice, they are just getting the geometry right, because the magnet has to sit directly under the clutch.

The ink question

Most hard tags contain nothing but plastic and a resonator. A minority, called benefit denial tags, do carry small glass vials of permanent dye, and they are usually easy to spot because the dye reservoirs show as coloured dots or fins on the tag body. The logic is blunt: if the thief cannot wear the coat without ruining it, stealing it gains them nothing.

They are less common in the UK than the internet suggests, partly because a burst dye vial in a fitting room is an expensive mess and partly because retailers do not love the optics. If you have a plain round or square tag with no coloured capsules visible, you almost certainly have no ink to worry about. Either way, do not try to prise it open at home.

The gates at the door, and the innocent beep

The two pedestals you walk between are a transmitter and a receiver, sweeping their frequency and listening for a tag answering back. When they hear one they beep, flash and, in some stores, quietly log the time so the shop can see when losses cluster.

Now, why perfectly honest people set them off. Soft EAS labels, the flat white stickers on packaging, are not removed at the till but deactivated: a pad at the checkout kills the tuned circuit so it can no longer resonate. That is not always complete. A label slightly off the pad, or held at an awkward angle, can survive with just enough response to trip a sensitive gate three shops down the road.

Then there is everything else that happens to resonate near 8.2 megahertz: certain metal objects, some cosmetic packaging, occasionally a medical device. Retailers know. They tune the gates below maximum sensitivity, accepting that they will miss some real thefts rather than accuse a customer every four minutes. False alarms are not a bug, they are a commercial setting chosen with a spreadsheet.

The newer tag that does know what it is

Alongside the old EAS lump, a second kind of tag has quietly taken over British clothing retail, and it is the one people confuse with the first. Look at the swing ticket on a new item from Marks and Spencer, Zara, Primark, John Lewis or Decathlon and you will often find a paper label with a fine metallic antenna printed inside it. That is an RFID tag, short for radio frequency identification, and unlike the plastic one it carries a unique serial number for that exact garment.

This is what lets a shop assistant wave a handheld reader along a rail and count a thousand items a minute, or tell you in seconds whether the size 10 exists in the stockroom. Marks and Spencer was one of the earliest large adopters in the world, and our piece on how M&S handled the technical challenges is a decent read on what that took. If you want to know what is physically inside one of those labels, we pulled one apart in anatomy of an RFID tag.

Some retailers now use these RFID labels for security too, replacing the old gates with readers that can announce not just that something left, but exactly which item it was. The plastic tag is slowly on its way out. It will take years.

What happens if you get home with one still on

First, nothing. It is not transmitting, it is not tracking you and nobody is coming. It has no power source and it is inert unless it is standing between two pedestals.

Take it back with your receipt and any assistant will remove it in seconds. The same chain helps, because detachers are keyed by strength and type, but you rarely need the exact branch. What you should not do is attack it with pliers, a lighter or a screwdriver. You will destroy the garment, and if it is one of the ink versions you will destroy it spectacularly.

And if the alarm goes off while you are walking out of a shop you have done nothing wrong in: stop, smile, show the receipt. Staff deal with this constantly. In England and Wales the police recorded 530,643 shoplifting offences in the year to March 2025, the highest since current records began, and the British Retail Consortium counted 5.5 million detected incidents costing retailers close to £400 million. Against numbers like that, the gates stay switched on and slightly over-eager, and the rest of us occasionally get beeped at.

Frequently asked questions

Do security tags on clothes track you?

No. A standard EAS tag has no battery, no serial number and no memory. It responds to a specific radio frequency at the shop door and is inert everywhere else. Even the newer RFID labels, which do carry a serial number, can only be read from a few metres by a purpose built reader, and there is no network of them outside shops.

What happens if I leave a shop with a security tag still attached?

The alarm may sound as you pass the gates. If it does, show your receipt and staff will remove the tag. If you get home and find it, take it back to any branch of the same retailer with proof of purchase and they will take it off. There is no penalty and no record kept against you.

Do all security tags contain ink?

No, and most do not. Ink tags are a specific product called benefit denial, and they usually show visible dye capsules on the body of the tag. Plain tags with no coloured vials contain only a resonating circuit.

Why did the alarm go off when I had not stolen anything?

Almost always a label from an earlier purchase that was not fully deactivated, or an object that happens to resonate near the same frequency.

Can a magnet remove a security tag at home?

A sufficiently strong magnet will release a standard clutch, which is precisely why retailers increasingly fit higher strength locks that domestic magnets cannot open. Trying it on an ink tag risks ruining the garment.

What is the difference between the plastic tag and the paper label with a metal pattern?

The plastic tag is EAS, an alarm device that knows nothing. The paper label with the printed antenna is RFID, which carries a unique number for that individual item and is used for stock counting as well as security.

We explain the everyday technology hiding in plain sight, one piece at a time. Join the RFID News newsletter for the next one, or browse everything we have written about RFID in retail.

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.

According to that reporting, the rollout follows a pilot earlier this year that the supermarket judged a success. Drapers says the trial gave Tu better visibility of stock levels, sped up replenishment and let the team manage stock more efficiently, the three benefits apparel retailers most often cite when they move to item-level tagging.

Ben Smith, Sainsbury’s clothing managing director, told Drapers: “We’ve introduced RFID this summer.”

He added: “We are going through a rollout now which allows us to maintain all of that product and spot any gaps that we [Tu] can replenish quickly.”

That last point is the operational heart of it. Gap detection on the shop floor is one of the clearest wins in retail RFID, and it is the reason so many fashion chains adopted the technology before their grocery counterparts did.

Catching up with the fashion pack

Drapers notes that the move brings Sainsbury’s into line with high street fashion rivals that already run RFID across their stores, among them Inditex’s Zara, Uniqlo and H&M. Tu sits in an unusual position, a sizeable clothing business operating inside a grocery estate, so the rollout is being layered onto shop floors that were not originally designed around apparel stock control.

The report also places the rollout against Sainsbury’s most recent trading update, covering the 16 weeks to 20 June, in which the retailer highlighted improvements in “availability and style” despite sales dipping 2.1% year on year.

General industry context

For readers less familiar with the technology, and by way of general background rather than anything confirmed about this particular deployment, apparel RFID almost always means UHF RAIN RFID tags applied at item level, usually at source in the supply chain. Staff then cycle count the sales floor and stockroom with handheld readers, often reading thousands of items in a few minutes, which typically lifts stock accuracy from the 60% to 70% range seen with barcode-only counting into the 90s. Once the stock file is that accurate, a system can reliably tell the difference between an item that has genuinely sold out and one sitting unfound in the back, which is exactly the gap spotting Ben Smith describes.

None of the specifics of the Sainsbury’s implementation have been made public. There is no confirmed detail on tag or reader suppliers, on whether the deployment uses handheld reading alone or adds fixed infrastructure, on where in the supply chain tags are applied, or on the commercial case behind it. We are not going to guess at any of that.

We are following up our contacts within Sainsbury’s to find more and will bring you the full case study if and when we can.

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.

Walmart framed the change as a matter of choice rather than a reversal. “We want customers and members to have choice in how they pay, so they can check out in the way that works best” for them, the company said in its announcement. The existing options all stay in place: cash, credit cards, Walmart Pay with its Walmart+ fuel savings, and Sam’s Club Scan & Go. Customers can also load eligible Walmart, Sam’s Club and OnePay cards into their digital wallets.

What is actually being switched on

Tap to pay runs on near field communication, a short range radio technology operating in the high frequency band at 13.56 MHz. The contactless bank cards already in most wallets are governed by ISO/IEC 14443, the proximity card standard that defines the air interface, the modulation and the anticollision procedure. Phones bring in ISO/IEC 18092, which covers NFC’s peer to peer and card emulation behaviour and allows a handset to present itself to a reader as though it were a card. Both sit on the same 13.56 MHz carrier, which is why a single read head at the till can serve a piece of plastic, an iPhone and a smartwatch without needing to care which is which.

The defining characteristic of the technology is its range. An NFC link works over a few centimetres, and that is a deliberate design choice rather than a limitation anyone is trying to engineer away. Coupling is inductive and near field, so the signal falls off steeply with distance, and the practical result is that a customer has to hold the device against the terminal to transact at all. A UHF RAIN RFID tag can be read across a room. A payment credential should not be, and the physics of the 13.56 MHz near field does a good deal of the security work before any cryptography gets involved.

The payment itself is EMV contactless, specified by EMVCo and implemented in the terminal as a set of contactless kernels, one per scheme, which handle the transaction flow once the radio link is established. NFC is the transport. EMV is the conversation carried over it. That distinction matters for understanding what Walmart has actually done here, because a terminal already running an EMV contactless kernel for tapped debit and credit cards is running most of the same stack a phone needs.

Tokenisation and the card number the retailer never sees

When a card is added to Apple Pay or Google Wallet, the wallet does not store the card number. The scheme’s tokenisation service issues a device specific token, known in the industry as a DPAN or device primary account number, bound to that particular handset and that particular card. The real funding PAN stays with the issuer and the token service provider. Every tap then generates a one time cryptogram, computed in the device’s secure element and unique to that transaction, so intercepting the exchange yields nothing that can be reused.

That is the mechanism behind the privacy point made in coverage of the announcement, that the actual card number is concealed during the transaction. It is not marketing language. The merchant’s systems receive a token and a cryptogram, and a captured token cannot be replayed on another device or typed into a website. For a retailer processing transaction volumes on Walmart’s scale, accepting tokens rather than raw PANs also reduces the amount of sensitive data moving through the estate.

The QR code Walmart preferred instead

Walmart Pay, built to keep payments inside Walmart’s own app, works optically. The customer opens the app, selects payment, and the terminal displays a QR code that the phone’s camera scans. It works, and it gave Walmart a direct channel to its customers along with the data that comes with it. But as a checkout interaction it asks considerably more of the shopper than a tap does. The app has to be open and on the right screen, the camera needs a clear line of sight to the terminal display, that display has to be bright enough and clean enough to resolve, and the camera needs a moment to focus and decode. Under harsh store lighting, with a scratched terminal screen or a phone dimmed by battery saver, every one of those steps gets slower.

A tap has none of those dependencies. The device needs proximity, not line of sight, and the transaction completes in a fraction of a second whether the phone is held flat, at an angle or inside a case. A few seconds of difference is trivial once and significant across millions of lane transactions a day.

MCX, CurrentC and the decade of resistance

Walmart’s position was never accidental. It was a driving member of the Merchant Customer Exchange, a consortium of large US retailers formed to build CurrentC, a mobile payment system designed explicitly as an alternative to Apple Pay and structured to keep merchants in control of the customer relationship and away from card scheme economics. MCX’s membership terms included exclusivity, and during 2014 and 2015 several members switched off the NFC acceptance already present in their terminals in order to honour them, most visibly at Rite Aid and CVS, which disabled contactless within weeks of Apple Pay’s launch. CurrentC never progressed beyond limited testing and was discontinued in 2016.

Walmart carried on regardless, promoting Walmart Pay and Scan & Go while contactless acceptance spread around it. Apple Pay is now accepted at around 85% of US retailers, and Home Depot, Lowe’s, Kroger and H-E-B took tap to pay long ago. Walmart was the conspicuous holdout. There was an awkward inconsistency inside its own estate, too, because Walmart Canada has accepted Apple Pay since 2020, which makes clear the objection in the US was strategic rather than technical.

That is also the strongest clue about the scale of the work involved. Walmart’s terminals have overwhelmingly carried contactless capable read heads for years, because the US market moved to EMV contactless card acceptance over that period, and the well founded industry read of this announcement is that it is largely a matter of enabling the NFC path and wallet acceptance in software and configuration rather than a hardware replacement programme. Walmart has not described the technical work involved, and the staged schedule, running more than a year before it reaches fuel sites, points to certification, testing and estate management rather than one switch being thrown.

Why Walmart’s scale moves the numbers

The market context explains the timing. Digital wallets accounted for 11.8% of consumers’ most recent in store payments in 2025, closing on cash at 12.1%, according to PYMNTS Intelligence. Mobile wallet in store usage reached 31% of consumers by late 2025, more than double the 14% recorded in 2024. Apple Pay was used for 10.2% of eligible in store transactions in 2025, up from 8.9% the year before, on estimated annual in store sales volume of $450 billion. These are survey and industry estimates rather than audited figures and should be read as directional.

Walmart’s absence has been quietly suppressing all of those percentages, because the denominator included an enormous number of transactions at which tapping was simply not an option. Adding the largest US retailer to the accepting side does two things at once. It lifts the share of eligible transactions mechanically, and it removes one of the last practical reasons for an American shopper to keep a physical card in reach out of habit. Google Pay, PayPal and Cash App stand to gain alongside Apple Pay. OnePay, whose cards Walmart is encouraging customers to load into wallets, has extended Apple Pay support to its CashRewards Card, with its Builder Card due to follow later in 2026.

For the contactless industry the notable part of this is not the technology, which has been settled and deployed for well over a decade, but the concession. Walmart bet that its own scale could push the US market towards a merchant controlled, QR based standard. The market went the other way, and the company has now accepted that holding the line was costing its own customers more than it was winning.

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.

Eight months from silicon to a certified SKU

That gap is the interesting number. A UHF RFID chip announcement is cheap; getting the die onto an antenna, through Auburn University RFID Lab ARC testing, and into a part number a brand owner can actually order is the expensive part. Avery Dennison’s listing on the Auburn ARC approved inlay database shows AD Miniweb Global UX with NXP UCODE X silicon at 42 x 16 mm, carrying spec categories I, L, Q, R, W5, W6, O, Y2 and B2. Spec Q covers retail accessories and Spec R covers apparel, footwear, headwear, accessories, watches and jewellery, so this is broad retail coverage rather than a single narrow category pass.

Auburn’s database does not publish a listing date on the public inlay tables, so we are not going to invent one. What can be said is that the ARC registration was already in place when the announcement went out, which is the normal sequence and worth knowing if you are trying to date the part rather than the press release.

What “globally tuned” actually removes

This is the claim doing the real work, and it is a supply chain claim rather than a performance one. UHF RFID does not have one global band. ETSI territories run 865 to 868 MHz, FCC runs 902 to 928 MHz, and Japan, China and Korea sit on their own allocations inside the wider 860 to 960 MHz range. Conventionally a converter tunes an antenna for one of those regions and holds separate stock for the others, which means duplicate part numbers, duplicate ARC submissions, duplicate qualification work at the retailer, and stock that cannot be reallocated when demand shifts between markets.

A globally tuned antenna is designed to perform acceptably across the whole 860 to 960 MHz span from one design, so one SKU covers all of it. The honest trade-off is that broadband tuning normally costs some peak sensitivity in any given region compared with a part tuned narrowly for that band alone. You buy inventory simplicity and pay for it in headroom. For an apparel or general merchandise programme shipping into multiple regions, that is usually a good trade. For a marginal read environment in a single market, a region-tuned part may still win.

The “first” claim, tested

Avery Dennison’s own announcement wording says the AD Miniweb Global UCODE X “leads the charge as the industry’s first globally tuned inlay with a compact 42 x 16 mm antenna to attain full retail ARC compliance”. Read that carefully, because the qualifiers are load bearing. It is not a claim to the first UCODE X inlay, and it should not be reported as one. Checkpoint Systems announced UCODE X integration in its smart labels in early 2026 and already has three UCODE X parts on the Auburn ARC list: Barber UCODE X at 45 x 20 mm, Njord UCODE X at 42 x 24 mm and Bora UCODE X at 70 x 14 mm. Checkpoint’s own wording is that it is “one of the first manufacturers” to get ARC certification on UCODE X inlays, which is a more careful formulation.

So treat “industry’s first globally tuned inlay” as a vendor claim in a narrow category, not as an established fact. We could not corroborate it independently.

The parts

• AD Miniweb Global UX: NXP UCODE X, 860 to 960 MHz, 42 x 16 mm antenna, 45 x 18 mm die cut, 128-bit EPC, 96-bit TID with 48-bit unique serial. Dry inlay IL-614627, wet inlay IL-614625, label IL-614626.
• AD Burst UX: NXP UCODE X, 860 to 960 MHz, 70 x 8 mm antenna, 73 x 11 mm die cut, same memory configuration, ARC compliant. Dry inlay IL-614629, wet inlay IL-614630, label IL-614628, plus a strap variant at 70 x 8.5 mm with label IL-614654.

Both sit on a chip specified at up to -26.2 dBm read sensitivity and -23 dBm write sensitivity, built on the non-proprietary GS1 Gen2v2 standard with configurable EPC and user memory. Note that the product pages use the “UX” suffix while the announcement uses “UCODE X”, so expect both forms in datasheets and ARC listings for the same part. The wider AD Miniweb family also includes Pure designation variants using aluminium PET-free antennas, which Avery Dennison claims cut carbon footprint by 70 to 90 percent against traditional etching, and those share the same 42 x 16 mm footprint.

Read more at https://rfid.averydennison.com/en/home/product-finder/miniweb.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.

Retailers talking about UHF RFID in public is not new. Retailers talking about the move from pilot to full store estate, with named people from named chains on the platform rather than a vendor presenting an anonymised case study, is a good deal rarer. That framing, “covering the move from pilot to full store estate”, is the part of the announcement worth paying attention to, because it puts the industry’s actual bottleneck on the agenda instead of the technology.

The retail maturity journey is the real story

Read performance stopped being the interesting problem in retail RAIN RFID some years ago. Modern inlays, tuned readers and a competent site survey will get you the reads. What separates a retailer with a working item-level programme from one with an expensive pilot is operational discipline, a much less photogenic subject.

Maturity, in practice, means encoding at source that actually happens on every purchase order, supplier compliance that is audited rather than assumed, a cycle count cadence that survives peak trading and staff turnover, and exception handling for the stock that the count says is there and the shelf says is not. It means inventory accuracy that holds at the same level in week 40 as it did in week two, across every store, not just the flagship where the project team spent six months.

This is why pilots flatter the technology. A pilot has a project manager on site, an engaged store manager, and a small enough universe that anomalies get investigated individually. A full estate has none of those things. The accuracy number degrades quietly, store colleagues stop trusting it, and the omnichannel promises built on top of it start generating cancelled orders. Any retailer that has taken a programme past a couple of hundred sites has a view on where that decay comes from, and it is worth more than another slide on tag economics.

Shelf readiness is grocery’s version of the question

The inclusion of a grocery shelf readiness session is a signal in itself. Grocery has trailed fashion on item-level UHF tagging for reasons that are structural rather than a matter of appetite.

The first is arithmetic. A tag that costs a few pence is trivial against a jacket and material against a tin. The second is physics. Liquids absorb and metals reflect at UHF, detuning the tag and cutting read range, so grocery assortments need inlay selection, spacer or on-metal designs and placement decisions taken per pack rather than a single garment tag specification applied across the range. The third is velocity. Fashion turns a season, grocery turns a day, so any process that depends on a periodic manual count is fighting the operating model.

Which is why “shelf readiness” rather than “stock accuracy” is the right metric to lead with there. In fashion, the value of accurate on-hand data is largely fulfilment: knowing you genuinely hold the item before you promise it to an online customer. In grocery, the money sits in on-shelf availability, whether the facing is full, whether the product is in the right place, and whether the gap gets closed before the shopper walks past it. That is a location question, not just a quantity question, and location granularity inside a store pushes you towards fixed infrastructure and overhead reader arrays rather than a handheld sweep on a Tuesday morning.

The complexity that rarely makes the case study

The third theme, the complexity behind large-scale deployments, covers the ground most vendors would prefer to skip. There is a genuine architectural fork between handheld cycle counting, which is cheap to start and scales linearly with labour, and fixed reader infrastructure, which front-loads capital and site work but delivers continuous data without asking anything of store colleagues. Most large programmes end up running both, and the question of what triggered the shift, usually a use case that a weekly count simply cannot serve, is one of the more useful things a retailer can talk about publicly.

RAIN-enabled smartphones, also on the Retail Track agenda, matter mainly because they attack the device barrier. Handing every colleague a reader is a different proposition when the reader is the phone already in their hand rather than a dedicated gun that has to be procured, charged, tracked and replaced. It does not remove the need for purpose-built readers where range and throughput are critical, but it changes what a retailer can reasonably ask of an average store.

Underneath all of it sits data quality, which is where more programmes quietly fail than fail on hardware. Encoding and commissioning at the factory means the integrity of the retailer’s inventory data depends on the tag vendors and manufacturing partners of every supplier in the chain. Duplicate serials, GS1 SGTIN encoded against the wrong GTIN, EPCs that do not reconcile to the item master: none of that shows up as a read failure. It shows up as an inventory number that is confidently wrong. Getting it right is procurement and supplier management work as much as it is IT work, and it is the single most common reason a technically sound deployment produces untrustworthy output.

Two retailers, two very different models

The pairing is more useful than two retailers from the same segment would have been, because the constraints are not the same. Decathlon is a vertically integrated sports retailer with a large proportion of own-brand product and control of its own manufacturing relationships. For a business built that way, tagging at source is closer to an internal instruction than a supplier negotiation, and the encoding standard, tag placement and data quality rules can be set once and enforced through the same organisation that makes the product.

Primark operates a high-volume value fashion model where per-unit margin is thin by design. In that world every penny of tag cost, every second of applicator time and every centimetre of tag placement carries a business case of its own, and the justification for item-level tagging leans more heavily on store operations, replenishment and loss than on online fulfilment. Two retailers reaching the same technology from those two directions is a more instructive comparison than any single deployment story.

What practitioners should listen for

If you are running or scoping a programme, the valuable content in these sessions will not be the headline benefits. It will be the method. Ask what accuracy level they actually operate at and, more importantly, how they audit it, because a physical recount methodology tells you more than the percentage does. Ask who performs the counts and how often, and what happens operationally when the count and the shelf disagree. Ask how non-compliant inbound stock is detected and what the commercial consequence is for the supplier. Ask what they moved from handheld to fixed for, and what they would not repeat if they started again. Those answers are the difference between a deployment that reaches full estate and one that stalls at 50 stores.

Why Madrid

RAIN in Action 2026 follows a sold-out edition in Amsterdam last year, and runs across three days of end-user case studies, live technology demonstrations and hands-on workshops, with 30 September and 1 October as the conference agenda days. It is co-located with the ECR Loss RFID Innovation in Retail Summit, whose sessions are retailer-only and by invitation, and carries the theme “RAIN: From Infrastructure to Impact”.

The choice of Madrid is not incidental. The organisers point to the city’s logistics infrastructure, its retail and fashion ecosystem and its position as a European distribution hub and gateway to Latin America, and to Spain being one of Europe’s most active RAIN RFID markets, with deployments in retail, pharma and cold chain logistics and with retailers including Inditex and Mango driving adoption. Putting a retail maturity conversation in the middle of that market makes sense.

Read more at 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.

“The new X40 is a pocket powerhouse,” said Jinoh Kim, Bluebird’s chief executive. “It’s sleek and ultra-fast. It’s RFID-enabled, and its AMOLED display, a world-first in enterprise-grade computers, delivers vivid colour and superior visibility under any lighting conditions, as well as consuming less power.” Kim also pointed to a Red Dot Design award won this summer, where judges described the device as an “impressively efficient tool for retail and logistics”.

An integrated UHF reader, not a bolted-on sled

The most consequential detail for RFID users is that the UHF reader is built into the device rather than added as a snap-on sled. Sleds work, but they add weight, a second battery to charge, a pairing step and another failure point in the hands of a seasonal worker on a Saturday shift. A single unit that reads RAIN RFID tags, scans barcodes and runs the warehouse management or store app removes the awkward handover between devices during a cycle count, and it means one asset to manage, image and support.

Bluebird credits the reader’s performance to Impinj Gen X. Impinj’s current performance feature set for RAIN RFID is Gen2X, released broadly to the industry in December 2024, and that is the obvious reference point. Gen2X is not a new air interface standard. It uses optional and extended behaviour within the Gen2 protocol that a compatible reader chip and compatible tag chips negotiate between them, with the aim of pulling more tags out of a population in fewer seconds and at greater range. Impinj’s own published figures for a Gen2X-enabled handheld put it at 98 per cent of items inventoried in 13 seconds, against 79 per cent in standard Gen2 mode over the same window.

That gap is what handheld RFID lives or dies on. Stock accuracy work is time-boxed by how long a colleague can realistically spend walking an aisle, so a faster read rate is not a specification-sheet nicety, it decides whether a store counts weekly or monthly. The caveat worth stating is that the biggest gains arrive when the tag population is also Gen2X-capable, which in practice means the newer Impinj endpoint ICs. On a mixed or legacy tag estate the device falls back to standard Gen2 behaviour and reads perfectly well, just without the headline uplift.

Two frequencies, three faces

Alongside the UHF reader, the X40 carries 3-face NFC, meaning the high-frequency antenna can be presented from more than one face of the device. Bluebird positions this for payments, ID checking and card emulation. In a store or a hospitality setting that matters more than it sounds, because a colleague holding a device in a pistol grip for tag reading should not have to rotate it to take a contactless payment or read an NFC staff badge. Having UHF for bulk item-level inventory and NFC for one-to-one interactions in the same handheld covers most of the tag types a retail or logistics operation actually encounters.

AMOLED and the rest of the hardware

An AMOLED panel in a rugged enterprise device is a genuine first. Enterprise handhelds have stayed on LCD largely because of cost, burn-in risk with static application chrome and the durability question. The trade is worth it for outdoor legibility, since AMOLED contrast holds up in a yard or a loading bay, and for power, because dark application interfaces draw less current on an emissive panel. Battery matters on a device that spends its day powering an RF transmit chain.

• Qualcomm QCM6490 processor, an industrial-grade platform with on-device AI capability and long-term software support
• 6.11-inch AMOLED display, which Bluebird says offers 26 per cent more screen space
• 5G and Wi-Fi 6E
• Warm swap battery for shift changeovers without a reboot
• Front and rear cameras with a time-of-flight sensor for faster autofocus and multi-barcode capture
• UWB DeviceFinder, an ultra-wideband beacon that lets a lost handset be tracked down to roughly the shelf it was left on rather than the room
• 199g, 1.5m drop rating with the rugged cover, and operation from -20°C to 50°C

“The X40 sets new standards in industrial design, as recognised by its Red Dot accolade,” Kim said. “It delivers a smartphone-like experience without sacrificing the enterprise-grade security, reliability and longevity necessary in demanding environments.”

TSC Auto ID acquired Bluebird in 2024, adding enterprise mobile computing and data capture to a portfolio previously centred on thermal label printing. The X40 is a clear expression of that combination, a device that reads the tags and barcodes a TSC printer produces.

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.

Why Acceptance Testing Matters

Every RFID deployment operates in a unique environment. Factors like metal shelving, liquid interference, ambient RF noise, and tag orientation all affect performance. What works in a lab will not necessarily work on a warehouse floor or a retail stockroom. Acceptance testing bridges that gap by validating real-world performance against defined criteria before the system goes live.

A proper acceptance test plan should define clear pass/fail thresholds, specify the conditions under which tests are conducted, and document who is responsible for sign-off. Without these foundations, you are left arguing over subjective impressions rather than measurable results.

Read-Rate Benchmarks: Setting the Bar

Read rate is the most fundamental metric in RFID validation. It measures the percentage of tagged items successfully identified during a scan event. For most UHF RFID deployments in retail or logistics, the target read rate sits between 99% and 99.9%, depending on the application.

To establish meaningful benchmarks, start with a known population of tagged items. Run multiple read cycles across different times of day, varying stock levels, and realistic operational conditions. A system that reads 100% of 50 items on a quiet Tuesday morning may struggle with 500 items during a Friday rush. Your benchmarks need to reflect the worst case, not the best.

Document the tag type, reader model, antenna configuration, and environmental conditions for every test. This baseline becomes your reference point for troubleshooting and future upgrades.

Stress Testing and Edge Cases

Once you have confirmed baseline performance, push the system harder. Stress testing reveals the breaking points that normal operation might never expose.

Key scenarios to test include high-density tag populations where hundreds of tags compete for reader attention, tags placed on or near metals and liquids that detune antenna performance, and tags at the extreme edges of the read zone where signal strength drops off. You should also test rapid movement through portals, simulating fast-moving conveyor belts or rushed hand-held scanning, and interference from other RF sources such as Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth devices, or neighbouring RFID systems.

Edge cases deserve special attention. What happens when a tag is damaged, partially obscured, or oriented at 90 degrees to the antenna? What if two tagged items are stacked directly on top of each other? These are not hypothetical problems. They are Tuesday afternoon in a busy distribution centre.

Documentation and Sign-Off

Testing without documentation is just playing around. Every test should produce a formal record that includes the test objective, methodology, environment description, results data, and a clear pass or fail determination.

Create a test report template that standardises how results are captured across your organisation. Include sections for test configuration, raw data, analysis, identified issues, and remediation steps. Photographs of the test setup are surprisingly valuable when questions arise months later.

The sign-off process should involve both the technical team and the business stakeholders. Technical sign-off confirms the system meets its specified performance criteria. Business sign-off confirms that those criteria actually satisfy the operational requirements. These are two different questions, and both need answering.

Building Confidence Through Evidence

A validated RFID system is one you can defend with data. When a stakeholder asks whether the system works, you should be able to point to documented test results rather than offering reassurance. When something goes wrong in production, your validation records help you determine whether the issue is a new problem or a known limitation.

Testing and validation is not a phase you rush through to hit a go-live date. It is the process that turns an RFID installation into a trusted business tool.

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.