Mike Graen is joined by a panel of guests as he discusses the power of RFID technology and what it unlocks in the food industry.

Joining Mike are:

Justin Patton | Director of the Auburn RFID Lab

Adam Anderson | VP at Avery Dennison

Jonathan Gregory | Director - Industry Engagement at GS1 US

Well hello, my name is Mike Graen. Welcome back to

another podcast on on shelf availability sponsored by

Conversations on Retail and the University of Arkansas Supply

Chain Department. Today we are going to be talking to a bunch

of experts in the RFID and food industry. RFID is certainly very

valuable for being able to track inventory of what you have and

where it's located. But it's also being used by folks in the

foods area, whether it's quick service restaurants or in

grocery stores to be able to track age inventory for

markdowns or a quick sale, and also other things for production

planning purposes. Join me today as we speak with Avery Dennison.

Mr. Adam Anderson from Avery Dennison. Justin Patton from the

Auburn RFID board, and Jonathan Gregory from GS1 about the

opportunities of leveraging the RFID technology in the food

area. Let's get started. All right. Well, welcome everybody.

Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, wherever you

happen to be. My name is Mike Graen and we've got a really fun

topic that we're going to talk about today. The topic is the

RFID or radio frequency identification in the food

industry. We're joined on the podcast with a very, very

knowledgeable group about both RFID and food. So we're gonna

kick it over and we'll turn at least in my thing right here,

upper left hand corner, Justin Patton, you want to unmute and

introduce yourself.

Yes, my name is Justin Patton. I'm the director

of the Auburn University RFID lab. Been doing this for many,

many years with retail, aviation, aerospace, and now the

food industry as well.

Perfect. Adam Anderson, you're up next.

Sure. Adam Anderson, Global Vice President

for food for Avery Dennison's identification solutions

business. Prior to that, spent some time with Information

Resources Incorporated, big syndicated data for retailers

and CPGs. And then prior a variety of roles with Walmart

from, grew up in the stores, but leadership roles in strategy,

innovation, frontline operations, merchant operations

all really centered around how do you improve the customer

experience, the associated experience while driving sales

and profitability.

Yeah, I'm gonna pick on Adam for a second. When Adam

was out in Colorado, he invited me to go on a store visit with

him. And I was fascinated because he was leading this

group of associates who really thought they had the best store

ever and we should be the best store and we're the best store

in the whole market, in the region, etc. Adam looks down at

a basically a bunch of vegetables. He reaches down to

the bottom of it, he picks out one that looks a little bit

bruised and a little bit, shouldn't have been there, it

should have been called and thrown away. He go, looked at

the store manager, and said would you buy this? The guy was

said no. He goes well then our customers shouldn't either, get

rid of it. What's your question about the the best run store in

the market? It was just hilarious. It was classic. He

then looked over at the rotisserie chicken case, said

see those chickens. He goes yeah, he says see all those

dirty fingerprints on the glass? Would you buy chicken from this

place? He was just one after another after another I learned

everything. I've learned so much in that one day just watching

him around and his basic thing is can you look at this

particular business in the eyes of a customer. I thought it was

a great visit. Has nothing to do with RFID and food but that was

one of my favorite memories of Adam. Mr. Gregory I don't have

any favorite memories of you so why don't you go ahead and

introduce yourself.

Thankfully, wow, that's pretty rough. So

yeah, my name is John Gregory. I've been with GS1 US about four

years. Before that deploying RFID solutions as a program

manager for 13 years versed in aerospace and then in retail.

Absolutely love my job, love talking about this and advancing

the RFID standards that are out there. So very, very happy to be

here. Thank you, Mike.

And you know, I was only kidding about the favorite

memory. My favorite memory was the 27 chip meetings that we had

to present for chip results. Justin, you and Jonathan and I,

good times. And myself, Mike Graen, have been in the industry

for about 40 years, spent 25 years with Procter and Gamble,

spent about 8 with Walmart, then went to Crossmark. So I've had a

chance to see both from a CPG standpoint, from a retailer

standpoint, and from a third party service. And now I'm doing

my own work in the consulting space on on shelf availability

and at least part of my time on the RFID initiative. So enough

for the introductions, just want to give you guys an opportunity

to basically talk a little bit about RFID. And I'll probably

start this out with you, Adam. RFID is usually been thought of

as an apparel or, maybe in a broader case, general

merchandise. So now suddenly we're starting to talk about

technologies like RFID and food. What exactly are the use cases

in for food from both a retail and then from a food service

industry standpoint?

Sure. Thanks, Mike. So, I think, you know, you

mentioned one of them, which is inventory accuracy tried and

true, we've heard about for years very mature in the

marketplace and, and inventory management from a accuracy from

a case level verification, or at a unit level cycle count. So

that could be, you know, if you think through creating that

digital twin for physical products, now counting

activities moved from one to one to one to many with really high

accuracy and you get all the efficiencies and sales lift in

terms associated with that. So so that's number one is just

that pure inventory accuracy. Next, though, is moving and

really starting to leverage the full capabilities of, of

digitization. So now you're getting into freshness and

expiry management and now adding the addition of extended item

attribution like lot, sell by, use by, best by, all of that

information. And those those processes, expiry processes and

freshness processes, which you described, you know, back in my

less mellow times of, it's been a contact sport. And really now

moving a lot of those processes from one to one to one to many,

and also from a first in, first out to first expiry, first out.

So really getting into extremely high level of detail around

managing inventory to ensure freshness. If you think about

kind of that, that one to one one to many of at a QSR, quick

service restaurant, it's the middle of the day trucks been

making multiple stops, there's customers in the store. That

truck arrives, you've got to unload it and victory today is

it just gets in the building. And, you know, most of the quick

service restaurants have guidelines around days of of

usage left in product and you know, can you really get to that

level of detail during during the thick of the business. And

now with RFID being able to really simplify those processes

identify, you know, is the product within the tolerances

that are expected. And then think about grocery you

described, you're in a grocery store today, if you're checking

date codes, rotation, days of freshness. Today, that is a very

long hands on one to one process that now through technology can

be automated and done with tremendous speed compared to how

we've grown up in the industry. Then I think as as we move

through, you start to see, and before I move away from that, I

think one of the things you see in the industry now especially

in Europe, we're starting to see where grocers have historically,

you know, battled on price and we're seeing freshness being

that new, you know, point of differentiation. Where grocers

are making freshness guarantees that say we guarantee five days

of freshness for this product, but they're doing it in a very

manual process today that that we see this transition happening

to more digitized solutions to enable that. And then as we move

across the supply chain now traceability, recall, and we'll

talk about food safety. But this value of digitization increases

as we move upstream to the supplier, community distributor,

all the way up, all the way to the farm. And so recall

processes today are are very manual and tend to be either the

the retailer pulls everything off the shelf, regardless of

lot, date, anything. It's just it's all gone or they don't pull

enough. And so now you can be very surgical, and one not

generate excessive food waste to not lose sales that don't need

to be lost. You've got electronic verification of all

the inbound, outbound, the recalls. And as well as we look

across the supply chain looking at dwell time visibility really

enabling upstream decisions, process improvement. So, you

know, again, recall efficiency and again, waste reduction big,

big benefits there. And then finally, my God as we think

about sustainability and like everybody's got their their ESG

goals. Now you're able to really, as you digitize a

product, you've you are starting to understand the environmental

impact through measurement. So not only did I save X heads of

lettuce, but the road, the road, the miles that weren't on the

road, the litres of water that weren't used to produce the

product that ended up being thrown away, now you can start

to understand your true impact across the supply chain all the

way, you know, and measuring that by product, by supplier to

really understand the impact that one's making globally.

Got it, when you talk about some of these use

cases, Adam, I'm assuming you're not just talking about pureplay

grocery stores. I'm saying, I'm thinking you're talking about

anybody who sells grocery. It could be mass, could be club,

could even potentially be you know, you know, drug store

channels that are selling some kind of food, right?

Absolutely.

Okay. Okay. So Justin, he mentioned something

in there, I think you probably have a lot of experience for

because I know a lot of people are going. I don't want you to

disclose who you're working with, unless that's appropriate

to do. But the quick service restaurant industry, they are

starting to look at RFID for some of the same kind of uses.

Is there any, is there any other builds that you have on the as

it relates to quick QSRs? You're on mute, Justin.

Thank you. So, um, you know, QSR is clearly,

there's a there's a labor issue involved because there's just so

many doors, right? I mean, retailers, a lot of locations,

but restaurants are even more, um, you can have tens of

thousands of doors in a single chain. And that's a lot of

people out there working in those locations and you know,

labor is not as easy to get a hold of as it used to be in the

past. So I think there's definitely a little bit of

pressure to make sure that we're being more efficient, especially

out there at the edge of the chain before stuffs going home

with customers. And also think that there's more pressures on

the supply chain in general, because there's been a move to

fresher foods, right. So most of the bigger chains don't really

use frozen beef the way that they used to, you know, five,

ten years ago. So you've kind of shortened your lifecycle, and

you've put a little bit more pressure on the supply chain.

But then you're also trying to be much more efficient with

labor out there, and making sure that we're handling the product

appropriately so. I think those things really make QSR more

advantaged. Anything that can allow them to compute a

inventory or a solid inventory count without putting a lot of

people going back there and checking lists or scanning

barcodes is great. And, and I also think that the word barcode

like it's interesting. There's very few industries we've ever

come across when it comes to the world of pure RFID. Where, in

some of these instances, you kind of leapfrog the whole

barcode thing altogether. There's a lot of products out

there that are in supply chain, especially in QSR, that don't

have any kind of barcodes on them. They're, they're, they're

the case is made to the product for a single SKU. And then there

will be like some kind of a lot and expiration code that gets

sprayed on there. But we don't have any type of real case

tracking system at all. And what Adam was saying earlier about

recalls and things like that, that really makes it a big

challenge. So sometimes when we're adding RFID into these

products that are going through the supply chain, it really is,

it's not just an upgrade to what they were already doing. This is

a whole new world, a lot of this stuff is really being serialized

and identified for the first time. So that's kind of

exciting, too, because it's not an efficiency gain at that

point. It is a whole new data stream that didn't exist before.

So anyway, there's there's a lot more to it than that, I think.

But QSRs are, are their own little unique world. And and the

last thing I'll say on that is, you know, when you think about

restaurants, in my mind, I always think about them as you

know, a restaurant that you go to, but even in retail chains,

like a Kroger or Walmart or Sam's or whatever they have,

essentially a restaurant in those retail stores because they

have the deli counter. They're doing food prep and serve there

at the at the at the store. So there's a lot of, don't want to

say bleed over, but it's a lot of close collaboration. There's

a lot that we can, with those supply chains start coming

together and merging much more quickly than they do in some of

the other industries where the channels tend to be more

divergent.

Gotcha. Hey, Jonathan, I'm gonna switch it

over to you. So I heard Adam say, using RFID for date encoded

or aged product rotation, freshness, etc. Last time I

checked, in a SG10 there is no place for a date. So how is that

possible today? And are there future GS1 standards that are

going to enable that to be much easier to do?

Yeah, happy to answer that. If I can first just

add to what Justin and Adam just spoke to. Just thinking about if

I'm a manufacturer of something, if I put an RFID tag on it, I

add value to my product, I differentiate my product, right.

And you're hitting upon this, but some of the use cases

include like this improved business planning, being able to

address shipping error issues before they happen, right. And

so by by doing that, and Adam talked about waste reduction, as

well. But even the Cricut being picked up, if I can use this

more rich data to be able to drive, hey, I'm only going to

have my garbage picked up when the bin is full, because of all

this rich data I have. Think that's just fascinating. The

other thing I'll mention is, there's something unique about

quick serve restaurants, in that you have limited time offers. So

you can actually drive demand up higher because you have excess

supply, which is really interesting. And then also the

operational efficiencies, I just saw there's one really

interesting example of say, meat that is palletized, and a

distributor or operator having to break down that pallet to

barcode scan each one of those items, and then rebuild the

pallet. All that labor that went into it because they couldn't

get line of sight data or they required line of sight data. So

that's really interesting. But to your point, Mike, yeah, the

SD 1096, it's been used in the apparel and general merchandise

space. It's very widely used. It has your product identifier and

your serial number. It does not have your batch lot or your

date, such as expiration date or say something like in that way.

Very exciting news coming out as of August, the tag data

standards, so the global standard that governs how data

is structured in RFID tags has been updated with these specific

business needs in mind. And so they allow what's new, it's a SG

10 plus. So instead of SG 1096, there's an SG 10 plus encoding

scheme that allows you to stack up and add this information.

There's also a DSG 10 plus, which is date prioritized. So it

is prioritized for management of expiry and things like that. So

very exciting development in industry.

So in other words, from a practical standpoint, if

I'm a retailer, I don't have to scan a serialized G 10 with an

RFID reader. Go find a database somewhere where the data is

there, it could actually be incorporated into tag without

changing any of the uniqueness of the serialized g 10. Right?

Exactly. I can be off network and still read

this data and be able to leverage it. And you think about

all of the items flowing through the supply chain, and all of the

supply chain participants. There are standards and ways to get to

that data for sure. But that could be overwhelming to be able

to have to look out for every single item, I want to find the

batch lot and cross reference and get this in real time as

I'm, you know, in motion. That could be a real challenge, and

so I'm really excited that this new mechanism is made available.

So not to put you on the spot, but what are some of

the attributes in this extended SG 10, SG 10 plus that would be

relevant for potential food and expired product. Did you have a

couple of examples of that?

Sure. Yeah, the examples would be say the

batch lot. So that's very important to the the KD ease for

FSMA 204 compliance, for example. But then also the the

value of various dates, you know, the Adam had mentioned

several of these dates earlier, you know, the expiry or packed

on or best by or you know, there's a array of dates. But

basically, or net weight is another one, like we're talking

about the example with the beef, the palletization. So they can

pull off the net weight value, which is very important. But

basically, any application identifier so there's a library,

hundreds of application identifiers are out there. And

so a senior GS1 global office executive, commenting on this

said that we're getting standards out of the way of

innovation. Which I think is really a powerful statement.

Yeah, and say we're making this dynamic, we're making it able to

adjust and deal with so we're removing this kind of static

elements that that held the industry in place here.

That's great. That's great. So So Adam, I got a

question for you. Well, one question and one comment. I

think the other one from my perspective that also values

RFID in food is those particular facilities that actually

manufacture product. So for example, baking cakes, baking

bread, baking cookies, whatever. Sometimes I think that they're

because of the on hands being inaccurate, they're making a

production schedule based on what they think they have. And

guess what, Justin, that's no different than socks right? So

the better job you can get your product, what you have, and your

sales forecast, I would imagine you actually bake things that

you need versus what you think you need. The industry, one of

the questions I got before this by somebody who couldn't be

here, and I thought it was a very good question, which is,

the Food Safety Modernization Act is how do retailers and

producers leverage RFID to support FSMA regulations? And

that's probably an Adam and Jonathan question.

Yeah and I heard Jonathan touch on it. So first

and foremost, there's a huge caveat with this, which is the

FDA won't formally announce the final details until November 7.

So any and everything we talked about is what we know to this

point. And

It's only a week away Adam. It's only a week

away.

So just have to have that caveat that says. Look

so FSMA 204's all about food traceability, and so really

applies across the entire supply chain with the exception of the

end consumer and across each stop of the supply chain it each

entities responsible for the events that occur under their

watch. So if you think about receiving, shipping, internal

transformation of product, each one of those will will have to

be tracked. And as Jonathan talked about, the FDA is going

to provide a list of key data elements and critical tracking

events for a specified list of food items that are at high risk

for foodborne illness. So a lot of leafy greens, raw eggs,

things, you know, a lot of fish, shellfish things along those

lines. And then each entity is going to be required to capture

master data so the things we're very accustomed to around

product ID, food classification codes, you know, it's an egg,

its fish, supplier name, and then and then variable data

points. And that's the variable data points is probably the

piece that that is going to be new to many around capturing,

receiving, shipping that transformation, date, time, lot,

product identification, and, and within this, as, as the FDA

reaches out, you know, each entity is required to reply

digitally to the FDA within 24 hours. So, and each member of

the supply chain is responsible. If I can, I'll pause for a

moment and I'll go through an example. But really from an RFID

perspective, RFID is a data carrier, just an can share data,

you know, as it travels through that supply chain. So as we

think about all the the value, all the value that it creates

applies in this instance as well. From, you know, the

ability to read one to many doesn't require line of sight,

and being able to transfer that data digitally across the supply

chain. But this can get really complex and so I I partnered

with someone just to talk me through give me a real life

example of how challenging this could be. And so we talked about

used a great example of commissaries and you have a

commissary that makes a chicken salad sandwiches. And for those

sandwiches they think their their secret ingredient is their

mayonnaise, it really makes it distinguished. That mayonnaise

is made with raw eggs. The raw eggs are more than likely going

to be on that item list. You have to receive the eggs, so

that's an event. Those eggs get turned into mayonnaise, that's

an event and now it's a new product that needs all the

product information. That that mayonnaise is now going into a

sandwhich which is now another product that has to be tracked

and have its own unique identification. So you can very

quickly see how large this can grow and the detail that's

required to be in compliance.

Yeah. Hey, we've got some eggs at a specific farm that are

being recalled.

Right

What mayonnaise did they go into, right. Who in the world

knows today? Well, where are people getting sick, right?

Where are people getting sick? Wow, that's tremendous. So it

maybe this kind of takes a different turn of our questions

because I think you know, Justin, we've been working 20

years on RFID at retail specifically apparel and general

merchandise etc. I'm hoping we don't get 20 years before we see

broad scale adoption of this technology or other technologies

for food. What's your guys's thoughts on, you know, how are

we going to, how are we going to get adoption sooner than what

has taken us to get up and running in apparel and general

That's an interesting question. I don't

merchandise?

know the volumes are changed, right, from an industry

perspective. So, you know, retail is such a huge number of

RFID tag units per year, compared to some of these other

industries. So from an innovation perspective, I think

a lot of the market kind of tends to be so focused on retail

products, just because that's where the most units that flow

through are because we're not talking in food about tracking

individual chicken nuggets. We're talking about tracking

cases and other things as well. So I think that it, that's,

that's a good thing and a bad thing, you know. It's a good

thing in a way, because it's not hard to go out there and be able

to tag up most of the stuff that that is coming down to supply

chain, especially when it comes to QSR and even in grocery

supply chain, like the volumes are easily absorbable. The

technology has come a long way. We've had a good chance to kick

the tires and work out a lot of the kinks on some of these other

products that we've been tagging up till now. So it's not so much

of a, I don't want to say this in a wrong way, but I don't it's

not so much of an innovation project. It's not a moonshot

anymore. It's just a deployment of a tool, right? Which is kind

of good. And I know a lot of people would probably take

exception, it's like, no, my company is very innovative. It

is, but we don't, some people don't want this to be an

innovation project. They want this to be here's a tool, I need

to go solve this problem. Let's go get it done. So I feel like

that there's a little bit more constancy and consistency.

There's a little bit, there's a lot more confidence in the

technology, which helps in a lot of ways too. So I think that

we've short circuited many, many years of learning from some of

the other industries and deployments that are kind of

helping us to make some more accelerated leaps when it comes

to food supply chain tracking.

Adam, your thoughts? Same, same same question. How

are we how do we drive adoption?

Agree with Justin. I think there is there's

it's been a journey. I mean, we've we've all been part of

that. I think there's a little bit of an outdated talk track

for those on the on the food industry that may have been in

the periphery that we may need to bring up to speed on as, as

Justin talked about the evolution of the technology,

this this isn't a moonshot, here's where we are. But But

there's still some historical pricing models or things that

are out there that aren't true today. Two is, is some of it is

just about timing. When you visit with folks in in the food

industry, it's, there's so much happening today and has been

since the pandemic started from all of the prioritization

around, you know, online grocery or mobile fulfillment, mobile

ordering to really investing in in media, that, you know, how

does this fit into all the technology that that they're

being really bombarded with today from computer vision to

mathematical solutions that. How does RFID fit? And the thing is

just being able to articulate, RFID will meet them where they

are, and integrate into their existing processes. This isn't,

doesn't have to be, a complete reinvention, unless it's unless

that's where the industry needs to be. So I think it's really

just ensuring, as an industry we're taking the time,

understand the needs of of where each business is and how we help

solve their business needs. This isn't a technology looking for a

problem, rather than we're just here to solve business problems.

Yep, absolutely. So Justin, if we think about just

the tag availability. We know you have got a set of arc

standards for things that go in a cardboard box or things that

go on a shirt or whatever. Now we're talking about lettuce

containers on a wet wall, or radishes, or whatever the

product happens to be, or cookies that are in a steel or

aluminum container that have a plastic cover on it. How do you

think about just in terms of the the, I guess, the RF part of the

radio frequency? Do we have tags that will work? Do we have

solutions for some of these use cases? And let me throw out one

more is that whole lovely one, which is if you put it on

packaged meat and somebody puts packaged meat into a microwave,

what happens? So I know we have solutions for that, but I think

it'd be helpful to your audience to kind of share from both Adam

and Justin. What have you guys already thought about that, and

if so, what are the answers for those problems?

You know, the physics of it is, I think people

are a little smarter and more responsible when it comes to the

physics of it. So first off, the tags have gotten a lot better,

and they continue to get better every year. So in terms of

performance, putting tags on most of the stuff you mentioned

is is not a concern, as long as we're doing it reasonably. So

like most people understand, hey, we're going to put a tag on

a case, we're going to do case inventory in a warehouse, or,

you know, through a receiving door or something like that,

that's no problem. The problem comes in when some people, the

company outside and say, hey, I'm gonna put an RFID tag on

everything, and they expect to read a giant pile of you know,

shrink wrapped meat. And then that's not going to happen,

right? We're not going to scan through, you know, a solid piece

of water, essentially, to get to tags on the other side. So, but

I think that at this point, we've had enough experience and

we're smart enough as, as an industry to be able to give some

good quick guidance on what is and isn't going to work. In

RFID, you can put a tag on anything with enough money,

right? So, but we want to make sure that you want to do it

within reason, so that it's going to be something that's

affordable and scalable. So I feel like the solution set is

there. I feel like the education level is higher, so that people

know how to more responsibly use the proper solutions to get

things going. And I also feel like that there's a lot of

innovation happening in chip and tag design, is taking us further

down the road that's going to help create even quicker

solutions for the same problems with products in the future.

Perfect. What about that whole question about RFID

tag has, has ink in it that's metal based and we've got

microwaves. Any, any solution for that one?

The microwave? You know, that's an interesting

one that we've seen that come up a few times with, especially

product that would go home with a customer, I guess. Um, I don't

know. I mean, my best answer to that is like, don't put it on a

product that's gonna go home with a customer, but I bet you

there's a better answer to that further down the line. So I

don't know, I hope I'm not stepping on anybody's innovation

there on this, but for the most part it's been use it

responsibly, use it where we need it. Most of the use cases

have been very heavily focused on we get a ton of value to

extract from supply chain side, less so on the immediately

customer accessible item level stuff like I've dealt with so

far. It's not like socks and t-shirts. This is a very

different scenario here in terms of what we're trying to track.

Adam, anything he's missed.

Yeah, Mike so as Justin talked about, solutions

out there for you know, whether it's on metal, on liquid, there

are wave safe tags, but again, used responsibly. This is not

meant to be, you know, in your microwave for an hour and a half

while you cook something. And also, it is partnering to build

out those solutions. So as Justin talked about, reading

that giant pallet of of meat at an item level. That's that's

pretty tough physics to pull off. But you can associate those

items to a case or an RTI and associate those to a pallet and

you know, your accuracies 99, 100%. So I think all of those

are just working the problem.

Yep. And to Justin an example, the meat bunker,

which is one of my favorite one, which is where you can't really

read RFID through a whole bunch of basically meat. Well, yeah,

but if it's that important to you, maybe you put a fixed

reader in there. So as you're actually putting the product in

or taking the product out, it gets read. So you may not read

it all the time, but you read it when it goes in, and so you know

it's probably there as well. So here's here's the one thing and

audience has, I think really has to understand is just because

you learned something about RFID, five years ago, it's

probably changed. Capabilities, it's always evolving. There's

new capabilities, there's new ways of thinking about it.

There's new ways of solving old problems. You know, the whole

well, it's way too expensive, it'll never work. Well, the tags

have continued to come down and costs and so don't just assume

because you learned it five years ago of something being

true, ie it doesn't work with metal and water. The reality is

there's some creative ways to work around that if you want to

get into it. So, a couple other questions. The first question

is, okay, what's the future look like? Where do you see this

going? And what is the respective role of industry

experts, standards, organizations and service

providers like GS1 and Avery Dennison to help solve some of

these problems.

You asking me Mike, I can hit that if you

want.

That's a question for all three of you.

All three, alright I'll jump in. So So I

think it's interesting the we've used this diagram before this

Crossing the Chasm reference and diagram that's credited back to

Geoffrey Moore, in the book that he wrote of the same name,

right? And so you see that disruptive technology makes its

way into the mainstream by getting a foothold in one

technology at one industry, and becoming widely adopted. And

then other industries kinda look over and say, Oh, the apparel

and general merchandise is using RFID. Maybe we'll do that too,

right. So at one level, there's, you know, it's been alluded to a

lot of the learnings about how RFID works, and the

infrastructure such as say the Auburn lab or the the GS1

standards or solution providers, capabilities, such as what Adam

represents as well, right, that's in place. But what's

interesting is that food has some slight differences between

apparel with regards to the demands what need happened. For

example, much more focused on potentially encoding data at the

point of manufacture. And so the industry needs some of those

norms, if you will, some of those clarity on supplier

requirements. It also needs and I believe it probably has but

one of the interesting things that apparel and aerospace as

well had was, particular leaders. Familiar faces that

would stand up at events and say, Hi, I'm Dr. Hardgrave or

I'm Harlan Azzam, or or who, you know, or, I'm, you know, Bill,

Bill from Macy's, you know. They would, they would, they would

stand up, and they say, this is a great technology, we're using

it, and you should, too. So, it's very interesting, as far as

the different things that, that encourage an industry to realize

we're not alone. We're all moving in the same direction

together. And so, so I would, I would call that out as kind of a

key point, moving forward for industry.

Awesome. Justin, any thoughts? What's the what's the

role of somebody like that in the in the, in your your space

in terms of helping some of this happen from an adoption

Well, a university, you know, especially

standpoint?

in a role from industry development, especially the

technology industry like this is clearly first and foremost, to

students, right. So if people are adopting this, then they're

growing those respective industries, and hopefully, we're

providing some students that are gonna go out there and work it.

That's our goal at the end of the day, that's our product, if

you will, if you look at a university like a business. And

I think that's been successful, and I think that helps just

elevate the general knowledge across the board in experience.

So, um, you know, in terms of working with the different group

members too I think one of the things that we do is we build

confidence, right? So I feel like a lot of times, when people

try to learn what's going on with RFID or especially if

they're looking for a large suite of technologies and

different types of technologies, it's easier to have a university

show them what's going on because it's academic, it's

neutral, governed employees, like, we're not really selling

anything other than the students that they hope they hire. But

um, it tends to lend a little bit more credence to I think

what what's happening here too. So I feel like a lot of our role

has been tours, tours, tours, tours, you know, explain,

explain, explain, explain, you know, check, validate, check,

validate. I feel like a footnote, a human footnote

sometimes. So like, somebody hears something, and they call

me to check, is that right? Yeah, sure. So. But I think

that's a little bit of our role here is to try to provide some

context and confidence and hopefully provide some of that

future workforce, it's really gonna make it all all sink.

Awesome. Adam, any closing thoughts for you in

terms of adoption and anything else that your organization can

do?

Yeah, so so one is I think we all have to be

students of the business and understand the end customers

needs and, and how, you know, whether it's RFID or a different

digitization solution, how those solutions really help help solve

those problems. I think two, you know, for for us at Avery, it's,

it's really about, you know, being students of the technology

as well, just just like at Auburn. You know, we have a lab,

we've built a grocery store, we're doing all of those things

to ensure that we're truly solving the the needs of the end

consumer, the end client. And, and really, then it's, it's

about value creation and we've talked about, you know, it's not

just about you know, I can I can hold a scanner or there's a

reader and it beeps and that's really cool. It's about no look

we're truly adding value that, you know, processes that used to

take hours can be done in minutes and accuracies, you

know, at near perfect results. That's meaningful. And so I

think it's really just about proving out that value.

Right. Awesome. Awesome. So I got I got one last

question. And we're gonna link some discussions that Justin and

Jonathan and I had yesterday. One of the questions that I just

got from somebody, which is to really understand the risks and

the emerging potential downsides to implementation. And the other

the other way of thinking about that is are our legacy systems

today, our ERP, our SAP, our EDI systems equipped to be able to

handle level of data at this level, because we're not looking

at this at the UPC level, we're looking at the serialized item

level. So what are some of the risks and emerging downsides to

implementation if some of the stuff isn't in place already?

Yeah, I'll jump in and just agree with you

that yeah, there's a gap between your typical legacy system, your

your MES, your WMS, your ERP system, and the the world of

data collection that RFID provides. RFID often opens

people's eyes. They use that terminology, right? It's like,

you turn the lights on and now you understand all the things

that you did not expect to see are actually happening, right.

But but being able to actually leverage that item level data

does require making some hard business decisions that relate

to IT governance. Where am I going to locate this item level

data? Is it going to make its way all the way into my core

systems? And you really have to base this on what are my use

cases, what are my business drivers. My business drivers

will help me understand where I should locate this item level

data and in doing so help me to kind of architect from that.

That's one point. And then the other point I'll make is that

the food supply chain is much more integrated than apparel in

this sense, right? And so that, that moves you to a, you know,

off of square one almost off of square one to another layer of

complexity, where you're collecting data, but you want to

be able to share that data with trade partners. So there is a

GS1 standard for that the EPCIS standard, which is very helpful

in doing so. I would say the biggest risk is to not be aware

of standards and not implement them because then you could

build up all this infrastructure and have a very high cost to

have to potentially rework it or constrain yourself and your

ability to to be flexible at that point. So those are my

comments.

Yeah, and just to build on that, let's not go back

to the 80s that says, okay, Walmart and the lettuce supplier

have their own way of communicating, which is

different than every other retailer, because that's not

going to help anybody that's just going to replicate all

kinds of difficulty, and this is hard, and boy this is a big

investment. The standards are there for a reason and Jonathan,

I'm really glad GS1 went out and developed the standards before

there was really a very clear who's the customer for this,

because it's going to be a huge unlock. I still think there's

still big unlock, which is well, that's great. We have the

standards now, we know kind of the artist's rendition of what

the subdivision is going to look like. We haven't put one pipe in

the ground yet. And so trying to connect this stuff with a set of

standards that have this capability with a bunch of

current infrastructure is going to be really, really tough.

Alright, we got a couple of minutes left, just any other

closing comments by any of you? Anything else you guys want to

add before we wrap up the podcast?

Well, you know, I think that making sure that

everybody understands how their organization is currently

handling data is crucial to this, right? So one of the

biggest, probably the biggest cause of failure to launch or

any of the current, you know, RFID or even some of the QR and

CV projects and stuff in the last, you know, 10 years has

been a lack of ability to integrate that data back in with

their current business. So UHF, RFID, you know, we're 17 years

in in the retail supply chain and still most retailers are

receiving blind when they receive a serialized UPC numbers

down in the store which is a major missed opportunity. I

mean, there's so many retailers, probably most of them now that

go out there and count this and they go here's a rich set of

serialized data on all the stuff to my DC or in my store. And

what do we do? We just count the total number, update the on

hands and toss that data into a repository somewhere which may

never be seen again. So we are so addicted to these old systems

of quantity level accounting that's very difficult to get

beyond that. I think food has been a little bit further along

because they have to because of many things Adam and Jonathan

mentioned here about the need for date lot and expiration, so

on and so forth. But we've got to get past these legacy

inventory systems, and these legacy data exchange systems to

really be able to make this something that is going to make

a significant lasting change. So I think the first step in that

process is, for everyone who's considering this or everyone who

has a problem to truly sit down and understand, like, what is it

that we are collecting and using at each point in the supply

chain? And even though we may have a process on paper, like,

is everyone actually doing this or are they kind of

circumventing it or are they playing lip service or whatever

it may be. And that will help uncover like the true, not just

the value, because value is great, but it'll also uncover

where the true effort is going to be. Because it's, it's, it's

terrible to go out there and spend a whole bunch of time and

effort and get a bunch of awesome data, and then find out

that you don't really have a good way to ingest it other than

a manual system, and then everything kind of slowly

trickles through. So I think having a good look at ourselves

as shippers and as warehouses and as suppliers and as

retailers and understanding what it is we do and don't know

before we move into some of these new projects is very

helpful in making sure that they're successful.

Great. Adam got a closing thoughts for us?

You know, Mike, first thank you for pulling us

together to have this discussion. And, you know, I got

into this space really around the passion around food waste.

When you think about, you know, in mature markets, food waste is

roughly 30%, and a very significant portion happening

before it ever reaches the consumer. And when you talk

about solutions, such as an RFID solution, you have this, it's

unique in that, and we all talk about the the near term benefits

of sales, labor efficiency, really driving inventory turns,

but also this halo effect of freshness, traceability,

mitigating food waste, and all the other sustainability

elements that go with that. It's really an exciting time.

Awesome. Jonathan.

Yeah, you may have heard me say this before,

Mike, but I would I would speak to the value of standards and

the value of community. So standards are in of in essence,

a form of infrastructure, if you will. It's like getting on the

highway, right. And if you think about it, by following

standards, you have your solution partners who produce

tags a certain way, right? You have your academic and your your

standards, organizations that give you this infrastructure

where you can, you can pull off at a rest stop and be able to

get this right, and you have the value of other people traveling

on the highway, right? You have that community elements where

you can get together and meet up and either, you know, being

connected within your company, and in your industry, and that

via say different avenues including what GS1 US provides

as far as workgroups and discussion groups and points of

contact there. So I'd say you know, standards are very

important to follow and, and very much a door opener, and,

you know, enabling the future to not be more costly than you want

it to be so, yeah. Final comments there.

Awesome. Well, guys, thank you very much for your

time, we really appreciate it. I probably should have started off

with this story, but I have a personal interest in this topic.

We will we always get our lettuce specifically from a big

retailer who will go nameless because I'm about to throw them

under the bus. But after about, my wife buys the spring mix

which are in a plastic container. And she literally

says after two and a half days, everything is gorpy. I don't

even know if gorpy is a word. Adam, you're probably the

professional at this. But gorpy is a word to her which basically

means it's already going bad and that drives her nuts. So much so

far that next year, I've got to spend probably two weekends

building raised flower beds because she wants to grow around

lettuce. So if you guys could solve this problem before next

spring so I don't have to spend two weekends building a flower

garden it'd be awesome. We really appreciate it but the

bottom line is customers are buying product, bringing it home

and they're frustrated over the freshness so. You guys are on

the right thing. It's not going to be easy just like Justin RFID

with the first set of retailers wasn't easy. It was a lot of try

it, do it, fix it. You know that didn't work. Let's try this etc.

People have to get involved in really, to your point, Adam,

what is the problem we're trying to do, food waste, freshness,

etc. It's the next big opportunity for this. So thank

you guys very much for your time. I really do appreciate it

and we will talk to you all later. Take care everybody.

Well, I hope you enjoy that discussion about RFID in the

food industry. Pretty exciting to think you can leverage that

kind of technology to eliminate food waste, ensure product

rotation of product in stores, or either service restaurants or

in grocery stores, and then being able to use that

technology to quickly identify inventory. Thanks for your time.