New Advances In RFID Help Food Traceability By Dr. Peter Harrop, IDTechEx

Written by Dr. Peter Harrop, IDTechEx

New advances in RFID technology include long range non-UHF tags; RFID devices that work well with "difficult" substances and RFID which is even sterilization tolerant. Learn what this means for food, pharmaceutical and other key markets.

It is usually taught that RFID at more than one meter range is impossible under the radio regulations of most countries other than at UHF, a band of license free frequencies around 900MHz. True, longer range has always been available if there is a battery in the RFID tag, and this is a viable solution for vehicles and trailers. However, these so-called active tags have limited life and they are expensive, relatively large and with more parts to go wrong. That has meant that UHF passive tags have been standardized for pallets and cases of food and other produce at the behest of leading US and European retailers and the US Military.

UHF RFID not ideal for all food applications
However, although UHF RFID works reasonably well with nothing in the way, indeed it is starting to be adopted for ear tagging of cows as well, it can behave very unpredictably when water or metal is nearby, let alone in the way. As Hong Kong Airport (tagging baggage) and Metro (trialling tagging of food) have found, sometimes the proximity of water or metal can prevent any reads taking place. At other times, things can be unexpectedly and annoyingly sensed 50 meters away, creating confusion about what one is sensing. In Europe, the problems of UHF are compounded by the Military and other vested interests preventing UHF radio regulations permitting higher power and wider bandwidth and this is greatly restricting range and control of interference between readers in trials of pallet and case tagging of food. Improvements to UHF systems are coming along but there is also help in prospect from great advances recently in the traditional HF (13.56MHz) and microwave (2.45GHz) systems making them longer range and more suitable for traceability applications.