Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Germany’s Metro Group, the world’s fifth-largest retailer with $96 billion in annual revenue and about 2,200 stores, has co-created a new kind of UHF-RFID tag that is reportedly delivering “nearly 100 percent read rates despite being attached to pallets loaded with goods containing metal and fluids.” Metro is using the new Avery Dennison AD-843 tag to track pallets sent from its warehouses to all of its food stores in Germany and to “at least 90 in France,” Gerd Wolfram, managing director of MGI Metro Group Information Technology, is quoted as saying to RFID Journal.

“As the pallets are loaded onto trucks, Sirit or Intermec RFID interrogators capture their tag ID numbers—reading them even in instances where a tag is obstructed by cases of goods—and send those ID numbers, along with a date and time stamp, to software running on Metro Group’s server,” the story said. “The software, designed and integrated by MGI Metro Group Information Technology, includes a database of pallet RFID tag ID numbers linked to the bar-code serial numbers of the products loaded on those pallets, enabling the software to interpret the RFID data and track when a pallet was shipped.”