- Food Supply Chain Requirements Differ from Other Retail
- Providing More Data Locked onto a UHF RFID Tag
- Proof-of-Concept at Golden State Foods
Oct 17, 2022GS1's new tag data standard, TDS 2.0, is zeroing in on perishable goods such as products in the food and restaurant industry. TDS 2.0 is an update to the organization's data-encoding standard for Electronic Product Codes (EPC). This latest update, targeting the food industry, features a new encoding scheme that allows for product-specific data, such as when a fresh food product was packaged, its lot and batch number, and its potential "use by" or "sell by" dates. The new standard was released in August (see GS1 Announces Tag Data Standard Version 2.0).
The TDS 2.0 standard provides potential benefit not only to the food industry, GS1 explains, but also to pharmaceutical companies and their customers and distributors, which face similar challenges with regard to meeting expiration dates and attaining full traceability. The standard is intended to serve an industry that is increasingly adopting RFID to solve supply chain and food-safety issues. "We see a whole lot of interest in adoption of RFID in the food-service space," says Jonathan Gregory, GS1 US's director of community engagement. Some companies are already applying passive UHF RFID tags to food products as they are manufactured, he notes, and then are tracking those goods to restaurants or stores.
The retail industry has already widely adopted RFID to track the movements of goods such as apparel or general merchandise for inventory-management purposes. The food sector, however, has different requirements. For one thing, the industry needs fresh food products to be delivered and then sold before an expiration date is reached, and to be easily traceable in the event of a recall. What's more, companies in this sector face a growing number of regulations around the safety of perishable foods.
Food Supply Chain Requirements Differ from Other Retail
When it comes to retail apparel deployments, the tracking of merchandise involves an EPC code, with a Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) and serial number to uniquely identify a product, but little else. Food companies thus gain less benefit from the inventory-tracking processes of such RFID solutions. There have been some workarounds, though, for companies tracking perishable or time-sensitive goods. Data could be stored in a cloud-based server, which would be accessible when someone read a UHF RFID tag.
Jonathan Gregory
There is not always easy access to a server, however, and even when there is, the full data capture can be slowed by this process. This is a significant concern for the wide variety of constituents who have a role in the fresh food supply chain, GS1 indicates. Products destined for a fast-food restaurant can be sourced by myriads of different supply chain members. In that case, Gregory says, "For many organizations, it's going to be too much of a burden to try to go online to get that information."
Another alternative that has been considered in the past is to write relevant additional data to a chip's user memory. The problem, according to GS1, is that user memory is not as readily accessible during tag reads. For instance, users cannot simply conduct specific searches for a selected lot number. Instead, they would need to read each tag and unpack all data from the user memory.
Approximately two years ago, a GS1 US working group thus began to examine possible solutions to this problem. Early on, the working group produced a basic guideline, Gregory says, though it was limited to the United States. That guidelines served as a near-term solution for the North American audience, whereas GS1 required a long-term solution that would be applicable globally.
Providing More Data Locked onto a UHF RFID Tag
That global solution, in the form of TDS 2.0, has been built in record time, Gregory reports, to keep up with the needs of the food-service industry. It allocates additional space on an RFID chip's EPC memory block to encode more data. This information typically consists of a batch, a lot date or net weight. The result is an EPC encoding that closely matches that of data-rich barcodes, Gregory reports.
Data written to the tag is designed to be immutable, GS1 explains, and structured similarly to the analog tracking ID number, the GS1-128 barcode commonly printed on the side of a case or carton moving through the supply chain. The structure to that code is similar to the layout of the TDS 2.0 standard. With regard to the GS1-128 barcode, Gregory says, the data cannot be changed along the way, and it is presented in a standardized manner. TDS 2.0 is intended to make similar, unchangeable data access possible with RFID.
For those reading the tags, a standard fixed or handheld RFID reader could be used, with some firmware upgrades, to capture details about perishable items moving through a warehouse or arriving at a quick-serve restaurant. Using TDS 2.0 to encode extra data will require higher memory than that needed for existing standard UHF RFID chips, which come with 128 bits of EPC memory.
Specific use cases will determine the consumption of memory, Gregory notes, depending on the length of the batch and lot ID numbers, as well as whether it is alphanumeric or simply numeric. According to GS1, the new standard is backward-compatible, so those using the SGTIN-96 encoding scheme can continue doing so.
Proof-of-Concept at Golden State Foods
GS1 US and Avery Dennison conducted a proof-of-concept at Golden State Foods. The research team tagged cases with RFID tags encoded according to the TDS 2.0 standard. With the batch, lot and expiration data encoded on the chip, Gregory says, approximately 153 bits of memory were required. Once the TDS 2.0 tags were applied, employees used a handheld device to search for items, based on batch numbers or expiration dates, then found them in coolers via the reader's Geiger counter mode.
The new standard could provide benefits to multiple industries, Gregory predicts. He cites the pharmaceutical sector as an example. Fresenius Kabi completed a case study in which it demonstrated the value of encoding data about drugs onto container labels. Drug information could be read at a patient's bedside or in a hospital's operating room, to ensure medicine is properly identified and has not expired or been recalled.
The pharmaceutical industry has requirements that are unique compared to those in the apparel and fresh food sectors. For instance, if drugs are kept in an RFID-enabled cabinet, storing data in the chip's user block might be more acceptable, since the goods are not moving and the time required to read their tags is thus longer. In the near future, Gregory says, GS1 US will conduct a working group that focuses on RFID tagging for the healthcare industry.
There may be other applications going forward as well. Gregory points to a system with which a user might want to lock EPC memory from updating, but not the user memory. "TDS 2.0 standard is a significant step forward for various industries," he says, as companies continue to roll out RFID for their supply chains. Chipotle, for example, has announced plans for a chainwide RFID solution, slated to go live in October (see Restaurant Chain Tracks Food Ingredients with RFID).
Key Takeaways:
- GS1's Tag Data Standard 2.0 standard will enable the food service industry to roll out a standardized RFID tagging methodology similar to the GS1-128 barcode.
- The pharmaceutical industry may benefit from the new standard, while GS1 may develop another guideline specifically for this sector.
