Host Mike Graen wraps up his conversation with Wiliot's Steve Statler as they discuss ambient IoT technology including:

- The future of ambient IoT

- How tags read in large distribution centers.

- Use cases for food safety and waste.

- Practical application for retail and QSR supply chains.

Hello, my name is Mike Graen. Welcome to the

University of Arkansas Supply Chain Management Research

Council focusing on on shelf availability. I'm happy to host

this and we've got a pretty exciting guest today. Steve

Statler from Wiliot is going to be joining us. Wiliot is a

Bluetooth-enabled RFID solution, which allows product to be

tracked throughout the supply chain. Join us in progress as we

get connected with Steve and hear a little bit about what

Wiliot has to offer the industry. So I think the the

asset-protection play part of that was just an example where

I'll just use a couple of examples. I believe Walmart is a

Sensormatic and Target is a Checkpoint. So you got two

different ones. So if I'm Procter and Gamble, do I put on

a Sensormatic tag, EAS tag, or do I put on a Checkpoint one?

And I kind of get stuck in the middle. My question, I guess is,

real specifically, let's just take Wrangler Jeans, I have RFID

item level tags in the clothes already. Or we think we're going

to get to a point where we would ask the supplier, this case

Wrangler, to put a Wiliot tag on the outside case to track that

case through the supply chain and have all the individual

items RFID tagged? Is that, because again, what you don't

want to do is say well put three different kinds of tags on this

product, because it gets confusing for the supplier.

Right. So yeah, maybe. We'll have to see if it

Right?

makes sense to double up. The future that that I see is at the

moment, Wiliot is one of the first ambient IoT players to

scale but and what we do we do with Bluetooth,. But there's a

lot happening in the background, that is a major force that I

think is going to disrupt all of these technologies, which is

ambient IoT is being adopted by a couple of other huge standards

bodies, 3GPP, they decide what's in 5G and 6G. And also IEEE. And

so there will be an 802.11, which is the Wi Fi standard for

ambient IoT, and release 19, which will be coming out a few

years to a phone near you will support ambient IoT. And so I

think, basically, the world will move to another generation of

intelligent tags where the tagging will not be just on the

hang tag, it'll be integrated into the wash label. And that

visibility in the supply chain will help in the manufacturing,

the distribution, the sales, but it also will help consumers. And

it'll open up new business models for manufacturers, where

they can start to see consumption of the product in

the consumers home and new business models. So maybe I want

us to rather than buying herbs and spices, I want to subscribe

to that there's a there's a vendor that I like a supplier, I

like their brand. And they can make sure that I don't have

herbs and spices that are out of date. And they never run out, I

have auto replenishment, these things can be used to trigger

water replenishment. And in the case of clothing, these tags can

be washable, like RFID. But unlike RFID, they can talk to

the radios that are in the washing machine. So you can

detect if you've got reds and the whites in the same wash, you

can make sure that that wash cycle is right, you can keep

track of how long it's being washed so that if you change

your mind and you don't want that product, maybe there's a

secondary market that seems weird and bizarre to us. But in

the same way as people will rent a tux, there's there's interest

in the circular economy as applied to clothing. So that's

where I see it going, how we get there, I'm not smart enough to

predict the exact sequence and when the tipping point goes from

the very successful first generation of RFID, to another

generation of RFID, which is ambient IoT being driven by

these massive technology companies. You know, you think

about the phone companies, they dwarf any of the technology

companies that have really been pushing RFI the they they have a

recurring revenue relationship with each of us. And that's

probably a good thing because we have to deal with privacy

implications and all that sort of thing. So we're getting off

into way off into the future. But that's basically where I see

things going. And this really will become we'll go from an

RFID market which is 30, 40 billion to literally trillions

of things that are online, that are making the world more

efficient and opening up some really amazing experiences and

helping to make shopping better.

Awesome. So we've talked a lot about retail and

individual retail store. I've got a question here from Steve -

and I think it's a really good one because I don't know the

answer. The question is here, in large footprint distribution

centers, how are the tags read? Is it an overhead reader? And

what's the typical read range that you would get much

different than a retail shelf environment and the DC? How does

that work?

Well, there's a lot of flexibility and how you

do that reading. And there's a lot of different third party

devices, we don't make the readers. So we're working with

an ecosystem that's expanding rapidly. And there's a lot of

existing movement to Bluetooth readers in distribution centers

to track things like forklifts, and pallets and more expensive

things. And we can tap in and reuse that we're working very

closely with the major makers of Wi Fi access points. They all

have Bluetooth radios. And so that's another direction. But

also what we're seeing is mobile readers that become pervasive.

So I'm talking about, you know, crowdsourcing using readers that

are on that are on forklifts we all wear? Well, no, we don't all

some of us wear watches that read Bluetooth. And so we see

our customers going in both directions. Some of them want

very low cost mobile readers that are pervasive, where it's

not literally real time, but because people are moving

around, you get this kind of up to the our view of things. And

in some cases, they just want to blanket the environment with

readers. And the range of these with our gen two product, which

is what we're selling today is about 10 to 15 meters, but that

range will increase, we actually just uploaded the designs for

Gen3 to the fab that makes the Gen3 chips. And so next year,

you'll see amazing performance that will give more range will

mean you can cover a warehouse with with less things. But the

biggest area of movement, I think beyond the warehouse in

the store is actually in the tractor trailer. So this is, I

think, relatively new. And it's to me, it's very exciting. It's

yeah, we're used to telematics in the cab the and we and we

used to, or we're seeing some movement with with wanting to

track the those big shipping containers that are somewhere

refrigerated, some are not. But the big thing that we're seeing

that's changing partly because of this technology is the

retailers and others Postal Service's wanting to see what's

in the container. So IoT started off with tracking the big

expensive things. But now we're kind of double clicking. And you

know, as we start to read these sensors that are going on cases

of strawberries, and tomatoes, we're seeing all sorts of

temperature excursions that no one even knew about before. So

yeah, there was a temperature sensor, maybe at one end, or

maybe a few test probes that were put in that we use for

sampling. But when you can see every single case and carton,

you can see a bunch of quality issues that may impact safety,

but certainly impact shelf life and the look of the produce. So

we want the produce looking good when it arrives on the shelf. So

people buy it, we want to extend the shelf life so that we don't

have to waste. And so there's a really big RFI that's going out

to very, very large fleet of the tractor trailers to make them

basically ambient IoT aware so that they can tell the state of

what's in them throughout all of the zones in these shipping

contains.

And so just so I understand, so a big tractor

trailer backs up to the back of a distribution center - let's

just say it's Procter and Gamble and it's all laundry detergent,

we've got Gain in there and Cheer in there and Tide in

there, etc. When they open that door and start unloading that

product, what you're saying is those readers could be on the

Ford truck or they could actually be in the tractor

trailer, sharing the fact that these items are in the trailer.

Now moving into the distribution centers. I have to kind of

logically we're walking through here, okay? And then once those

once those cases go up into the steel, where there's a place

that they're stocked and stored until a store would order them,

what reads them up in that steel? Is it people walking by

who have got Bluetooth enabled phones and devices and, and

watches, what gives you that signal?

Um, it will vary because this is these are like

Lego bricks, you can put them together and all the way. But I

think what you described will actually be the exception. If

you have a lot of these readers around, you can start rather

than sit take, again, it's the difference between a black and

white snapshot. And relying on the fact that everyone's got a

phone that can record streaming video, so you have enough

readers around, you can start to see the movement. So the the the

the inventory goes from being a snapshot to a vector, where

you're actually starting to track the movement of things and

you knew, they know, you can see where they were last seen. And

you can actually start tracking the movement of where it went.

And maybe it disappears at some point. But but you've got a

pretty good it's a bit like the security cameras in in the major

cities, you don't have 100% coverage. But you know, you have

a pretty good idea where things have gone. Even if you don't

have 100% coverage, I think eventually we will get 100%

coverage. But that's not the reality of 2023. But we do get

that vector view rather than the snapshot view.

Gotcha. So another text that I just got for

food safety is one of the big issues surrounding, that

has been for a long time, not only food safety, but waste -

how much food that we throw away all the time. And I know if if

you've been had been part of this, I believe Wiliot has a

tremendous opportunity to potentially save millions in

terms of the waste and make sure fresh product is ending up with

the customer. Is is that some of your primary use examples that

you're using? If so how does that work? How does that work

practically?

Yeah, I think, again, the driver, for a lot of

our customers has been the OSA but then they suddenly realize

they have a way of measuring temperature over time, and even

humidity. So these, every single one of these things is a

temperature sensor. And it's pushing out that that

temperature, visibility. And so what we have seen when you put

these on cases, and crates and pallets, and totes, individual

totes, sometimes we see fruit that has been frozen and

defrosted and frozen, frosted, half a dozen times between the

DC and the store. So imagine what that does to the look and

the life of that product. I'm excited because I think some of

the value players that are out there in retail actually because

they're they're so big and so sophisticated, they can deploy

this infrastructure, I think they have an opportunity to be a

quality freshness player as well. Because they've put this

digital infrastructure in place, they put the readers in place,

and suddenly they can start using it for other things. And I

think the food safety, Modernization Act compliance,

it's coming. It's going to be it's really very difficult for I

was speaking to one of our customers, and I'm like, so do

you think the industry will push back and the FISMA deadline for

being able to give a inventory within 24 hours of the food

incident of every leaf of lettuce that might be impacted?

Do you think that is going to get pushed out? And you said, we

can't take that risk, because if we decide, we're going to assume

it's not going to happen and our nearest competitor does it, then

it's going to make us a really bad and B they are going to

design the standard operating procedure that we'll have to

adopt. So I think I think the big grocery chains are taking

this very, very seriously. And you know that they have a

challenge, which is, you know, scanning in every case in at the

back of the store has not been something that generally is

done, you generally assume what has been sent is what's being

received. And so the idea of hiring, you know, three shifts

of workers to start doing case level scanning with handheld

optical scanners or even RFID scanners that's hugely

expensive. So if you can just use this digital ambient IoT

digital real time visibility platform that you put in for

OSA, but to start to do the case level tracking that allows you

to then produce that spreadsheet that the FDA could ask you for

with 24 hours notice then I think that's that's a win and

it's it's Probably a compelling event that will start to

accelerate the deployment of the infrastructure, which will help

the OSA problem. But it's also going to help with regulatory

compliance, which is kind of a non optional thing that that has

to be responded to. And it's, it's not just grocers, it's it's

quick service restaurants, it's a lot of very large companies

that are having to re engineer. And on one level, it's kind of

simple, I need to have these lock codes, these traceability

lock codes that come from the producer that identify a batch

and ultimately identify the field where the where the

spinach or the lettuce came from. But then I need to keep a

handle on where it is. And just saying that it was scanned on

the shelf isn't good enough, you need to know where it is in the

backroom. And you need to not guess that it got off the truck,

but you need to scan it and seen it. And so I think you know, in

the same way as because what we're talking about with ambient

IoT, in a way is infrastructure and infrastructure is

notoriously hard to justify and pay for. And the reason why

we've got a highway system, arguably one of the best highway

systems in the world in this country is not because they

wanted you and me to have a better journey to our business

or on holiday, it was because they had to move the missiles

from Eisenhower had to move the missiles. That was the

compelling event that drove the infrastructure that then helped

fuel our economy that allowed these trucks to get to faraway

places. And so I think food safety is going to be that

compelling event that will drive the infrastructure that will

actually help omni channel - the omni channel OSA problem - get

get solved in a solid way.

Well, I love that analogy. And I just think back

just a few years ago used to order something from a retailer

and you log in the UPS or FedEx or whoever else was and they go

'it should arrive next Tuesday.' Well, now it got shipped from

this location to this fulfillment center to this

consolidation center. It's coming out of that consolidate

center, it's on the road, you'll see it by two o'clock on

Thursday, that kind of incredible value that from a

customer perspective, I know, where am I stuff is in the route

is real helpful. But today, Steve, I think that a lot

requires a lot of people taking extremely expensive labor and

scanning stuff or running it through a tunnel or doing this

or we're spending a lot of money from a label perspective or

perspective, having people in a store in a retail supply chain,

collect data for our systems. And no offense is number one,

they don't do it very well. They don't do it very thoroughly all

the time. Number two, it's not something we should be having

them do, we should figure out how to collect that data. As

they're unloading a truck, that information should just be

collected, I shouldn't have to stop and do a step like scan

this or one this or turn this on etc to actually get that data

collected. I think that's a real, real important fact. And I

think that's, that's the enabling technology that either

your technology can do or to kind of fix infrastructure with

RFID. can do I think that's the future. getting companies to pay

for that is exactly right, which is all but that's so expensive.

Yeah. But when you add up all those business cases, it becomes

a much better selling proposition. Maybe we just need

to move military equipment across the country. Maybe that's

the answer. I don't know. I don't know. So a couple of

things there. The other thing is, and we've kind of touched on

this a little bit, but there's a lot of technology out there for

the retail supply chain to wrestle with. I've got current

2d barcodes, I'm moving with sunset 2026 to more QR codes or

to you know, more more advanced barcoding. I have UHF RFID, or

rain or whatever you want to call that. I've got vision

technology. Now I've got Bluetooth technology, which is

under the umbrella. If I'm a retailer, I'm getting really,

really confused about how this stuff fits together. How would

you summarize the specific fit that Wiliot has today for a

retail supply chain? And what do you think that these are some of

the future stuff like we've already talked about? But what's

the practical application today for the retail supply chain of

your technology?

I think the way one of our customers sees what

we do for them - and I love it when smart people express

something in a very simple way. It's to me it's the sign of

intelligence when someone can take a really complex thing and

boil it down to a simple phrase and, and it seems like customers

have been the best ones to do that. And they basically

described us as their visibility platform. So they have

automation platforms, and they have a visibility platform. And

so having visibility is that infrastructure that then allows

you to solve the the nil pick problem, the omni channel

paradigm that has been driven into our lives by COVID. And is

not going away, my mom is, you know, she's not getting any

younger, she's going to continue ordering online. And so, you

know, in my mind that visibility platform for a retailer, it's,

it's a great solution for omni channel. It's a great solution

for food safety and regulatory compliance with FISMA. And it's

also a great solution for sustainability and freshness.

And I put those, those two together, as one of the things

that you can do with this that some people may not care about.

But, you know, the, the SEC cares about is being able to

measure a carbon footprint accurately. And it's really

difficult in the moment. I mean, there's a huge amount of turmoil

in companies, particular with the CFO, they have to respond to

this new SEC requirements on climate and sustainability. And

they have to have plans to get a handle on what the carbon

footprint is. And so there's a bunch of theoretical work that

goes on that may or may not be right, but it's sort of the

current benchmark is give me a theoretical view of what the

carbon footprint is, across my 3000 stores. What we're able to

do, once you accept, okay, I need a visibility platform is we

can actually start to give you real time visibility of the

carbon footprint of a given product, a given distribution

route a given store. And don't forget carbon is essentially

cost, you know, when we when we it's a measure of the raw

materials. And the worst thing for your carbon footprint is

when produce rots, because it gives off methane. And so your

carbon footprint knows numbers go off, but also you're writing

this stuff off the balance sheet as well. So you know, my

personal view is that carbon counting carbon will be the next

six sigma. For good enterprises, you'll know that it's a quality

company, if they can give you a really good carbon report. And

the paradigm shift for carbon reporting will be from

theoretical to real time, product level carbon

footprinting, and then you can start making the whole

organization accountable for moving forward and getting the

efficiency that we either want because we like hugging trees,

that's what I like to do. Or we like to reduce the carbon

footprint because it just means we're going to be more

profitable and more efficient and have be more competitive. So

if you are tasking a store manager with you know, you need

to reduce your carbon footprint and having those fruit and

vegetables overnight in that reefer container that's in the

carpark. Not only is a problem because people can't buy the

stuff. But it's also just a terribly wasteful way of keeping

produce chilled. That kind of real time carbon accounting, I

think is is actually going to be the thing that excellent

companies use. So if the business problem is omni

channel, the compliance problem is food safety. I think that

carbon accounting and real time visibility of carbon and cost

will be kind of the new quality metric, which will be an

operational driver, and, you know, the person that's

accountable for that is actually the CFO. And they're the ones

that, you know, no one argues do we need? Do we need a system to

run SAP on? You know, when did you hear about a debate about

spending money on the EY PwC bill or the ERP system? Right? I

mean, that stuff just gets taken care of, because the person that

really understands the need is the guy that or the girl or the

lady or the woman that holds the purse strings. And so I think

ESG may be the environment, social governance, and

particularly the SEC mandates on carbon accounting will be

another driver for bringing us into the new age where the the

digital and physical come together, and we get visibility

on everything around us.

I just got a question from Robert Taylor. And

I think it's a very good one. I assume this is very applicable

about what we're talking about food, which is quick service

restaurants, I'm assuming this is a copy and paste of what

we're seeing in a retail supply chain is certainly applicable

for the QSR business, right?

There's some twists that are different, but

they essentially they have to comply to FISMA. They have, you

know, my kids are in their, in their 20s. And so I'm learning a

lot about QSR from the side of the people that are working. And

having brought my kids up, I'd like to think that model

citizens but they are challenging employees, and so

running a quick service restaurant, you know, whether

it's the high end, sort of the Panera, Starbucks, or

McDonald's, which is where I worked when I was a kid. It is

amazing that they're able to do what they do with unseasoned

workforce. So automation, you know, relying on people scanning

and checking things in and the labor shortages they have, you

need to be checking in and certainly applying complying to

FISMA. But just tracking where things are, I couldn't believe

it. One of my shortly before I joined Wiliot six years ago, I

was on a plane with a guy that sold furniture to Starbucks, and

I just written this book called beacon technologies, I thought

it was pretty obscure. And I recognize the fact that 90% of

the people I'm going to sit next to on an aeroplane are not going

to understand what a Bluetooth tag is. And I just sort of tell

him expecting that this is the way that I'm gonna get a

peaceful night's sleep on the way to London, where I was

flying back to see my family. But actually, we ended up

speaking for three hours because he was putting Bluetooth into

Starbucks furniture because they actually have merchandising

compliance challenges of knowing you know, was is the furniture

was supposed to be is the display out there. And the way

that he felt this needed to be solved was embedding visibility

into into the furniture that he was making sell into one of the

world's biggest QSR. So visibility is super relevant to

QSR freshness, food safety is inventory is and they have a lot

of the same labor problems that you very eloquently described

earlier.

Yep. Awesome. Steve, I got one last question. And

then we'll kind of wrap it up here. We're kind of heading to

the end of the hour. The first is, I usually say do you have

any closing comments. But the other question I would ask you

is, what question did I not ask that I should have? So anything

on your anything on your mind that we didn't cover? You think

it's important for our audience to hear or any closing comments

that you have?

I think you asked amazing questions. And I will I

think what you're doing here is important good work. So I don't

have any, any constructive criticism at all. To wrap things

up, I would say it's worth people checking out this new

phenomenon of ambient IoT. And I've been, I'm the marketing

guy. So I've been selling our pixels, the we call them pixels,

because they bring their small, they bring light to things, you

have a lot of them and you suddenly get this high

definition picture that shows you things that you can see

before so as you can say, see, I'm a big Wiliot fan, but I

would say the category is actually more important than the

company. And this ambient IoT category is is growing. I think

it's the way we get RFID from billions to trillions. And I

think it's the way we solve some of the big problems that you and

I have been talking about. And I would say there are huge

opportunities for everybody in ambient IoT, whether you're

making tags, whether you're making edge devices, whether

you're a software developer, there's a lot of education

that's required. So people like you, and the press and the

industry analysts and the management consultants are very

important in this transition to getting visibility that will

help us solve some really important problems. So and of

course, then the practitioners, the, you know, the retailers and

the people that actually need to use the technology. There's a

lot of opportunity. And I think, you know, the more we can learn

together and and this is not about fighting for market share.

This is about building this new future together as quickly as we

can.

That's awesome. Well, Steve, I want to thank you

very much for your time. I know it's your birthday weekend. So

you got plans right after this to head out and do some

celebration and your birthday. Don't go into stores and look

for COVID tests. That's not part of your birthday celebration. So

enjoy that. I do know that you're also going to be joining

myself and a lot of other people next week in Orlando at RFID

Journal. I believe you will have a booth there. So if anybody has

any specific questions, they can certainly look you up. I'll be

there Tuesday through Thursday as well, I'm actually leading a

session about the future use cases in retail of RFID. So I'd

love to have you guys in the audience join us for that. But

Steve, thank you very much for your time. Incredibly helpful.

It's, that's why we like this platform. It's conversations on

retail, and that's what we've been doing for the last hour.

So, thank you very much. Have a great weekend. Have a great

birthday celebration, and we'll see you next week in Orlando.

Thank you, Mike. See you there.

Take care. Well, I hope you enjoy that series with

Steve Statler, the CMO of Wiliot. We'll continue our

series with on shelf availability experts starting

next month. Please join us and we'll be right back here

discussing on shelf availability in retail. Take care.