Host Michael Graen is joined by Jonathan Gregory from GS1 to discuss RFID Technology in the food sector. This part 1 episode includes talking points on:

• GS1's role in the industry.
• Food waste and its impact on the environment, retail, and consumer safety.
• Reducing food waste in supply chain using RFID technology.

A good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning,

wherever you happen to be welcome to Conversations on

retail. My name is Mike Graen, and we're going to do yet

another series in our focus on on shelf availability. And we're

going to actually go back and combine a couple of topics

together because on shelf availability plays an important

role in making sure you've got what the customer wants. But we

have talked about RFID and food before leveraging RFID

technology to make sure you have the freshest product and

delivered to your customer. Number one, but number two,

we've also talked about a concept that GS1 has called

Sunrise 2027. And we're gonna talk about how they actually

potentially fit together in a big way. My, my, my guest is

returning to the scene of the crime: Jonathan Gregory.

Jonathan, you want to unmute and give us a little bit of

background about you and your your history?

Hey, Mike, good to be with you here today.

Yeah, it's great to be with you again. So a little bit of my

history. Yes, I've been with GS1 us for about five years. And

before that was deploying RFID solutions for 13 years in the

aerospace and in the retail environments. And even before

that, dealing with IT systems, largest ERP system in the world

at that at its time deploying that out dealing with shop floor

labor collection, and the like. So that's kind of the

professional career I am a dad, father of four, so I like to

throw in a dad joke here and there. So potentially some corny

jokes on the way as well.

All right, um, put you on the spot. Because I

didn't tell you I was gonna ask you this question. Give us your

hobby. What's your best hobby?

Oh, man. So the one that I like most, it's

the most distinct is winter hiking. I will take my son out

into the Adirondacks or some guys out - some buddies - and I

will go out and try and survive for a couple days in the woods

in the deep snow. And it always makes me appreciate my couch for

the whole rest of the year. So that's, that's the biggest

hobby. Yeah.

Is this the whole you wear the shoes that look

Oh yes. Snow shoes and layered up and

like tennis raquets.

pitching a tent in the snow and all that jazz just can't be

that?

Why? The obvious question is whu? Because

somebody else said, Oh, I love to run marathons, like why?

Because it's there. It takes you completely

talked about a vacation like, right, it completely takes you

out of the day, day to day and puts you in a state of being if

you will, so I have to survive here.

You could buy those things. You could say I love my

son, but I'm gonna take him out in the woods or leave him and

see if I can make it back. And since it's called survival

training from that.

I wouldn't leave him but but it also forms

certain bonds between people like when you suffer together.

You never forget it, you know? So it's a good time.

Oh, my goodness. You know, I've known I've known you

probably by five years, and I never knew that about you. So

I'm glad I asked. Yeah. Tell us. So you've been so you've been a

GS1 for five years. For those people who don't know, GS1 is

what and why are they important to the industry? Help us

understand a little bit more about what GS1 does?

Yeah, great question, Mike. So So about 50

years ago, the UPC barcode was invented. Right. And, you know,

that was because long checkout lines and grocery stores, well,

somebody has to govern the standards and the data so that

you know, brand A and brand B don't have the same barcode

value on them. So you need a neutral third party GS1 us is a

GS1 is a not for profit organization that ensures that

common standards are applied. So we govern a whole system of in

industry commerce standards. So this spans from identifying

products, or locations or business entities or shipments

to the realm of capturing that data. So the standards for

barcode symbologies that relate certainly the RFID standards, so

just one maintains the technical standards that undergird and

power the RFID technology and then this year, so Id capturing

the the sharing of that data. So GS1 maintains the standards for

EDI, so purchase orders, advance shipment notices things like

that. The GDSN is a global data synchronization network that

provides product attribute data. So as a way of getting to a

common picture and understanding of it product attributes, you

know what size dimension, you know that information, net

weights, product image, that type of information. And that's

really necessary for industry commerce. So the other thing I

wanted to mention about GS1 is that it is a global federated

network. So I'm with just one us the United States instance, if

you will have just one, one, but there's just one China, Japan,

Brazil, etc. They're over, I believe 116 countries specific,

pick just one organizations that are all not for profit or

government agencies. And so what this does is it gives you a

global industry, commerce, infrastructure, if you will,

that insures kind of these basic elements of business vocabulary,

if you will, are available and be leveraged. And every day over

10 billion GS1 barcodes are scanned. So I'm pretty intense.

That's awesome. Yeah, and I've been around the

industry to know the pain of not leveraging GS1 standards. When I

start first started, I was with Procter and Gamble, I first

started working with Walmart, we wanted to do a thing called

continuous replenishment where literally, we would get orders

in DC levels of inventory. And we build the orders for Walmart

and actually shipped the product. But we did it in a

proprietary standard, because there was no standard for that

at that time. So I'm not gonna tell you how old that was a long

time ago. And they want to run to reapply for target and Kroger

and Target and Kroger wanted in a different format. And we

quickly said, we do this for 50 customers, we've got 50

different ways of getting orders and invoice information into our

system, stop, we got to do something else It was right

about the time the GS1 came up with, 'Hey, we are going to

create EDI, Electronic Data Interchange standards for

sharing product information and invoicing and purchase order

etc.' Now everybody's on one standard, you don't have to have

a different set of standards to work with different retailers,

which is incredible. So thank you for your hard work. It's

sort of it's sort of like the DNA of the body. When it works,

you take it for granted. And when it doesn't work, you get

really, really sick and you don't know why. And that's if

you don't have the standards and the rules, everybody can plays

by their own rules. And that's that becomes very costly, right?

Yeah, it works best when you don't really have

to think about it. Right. It's interesting in the background.

Yeah, for sure.

So so the the focus of this channel is really on

shelf availability. And we're going to talk a little bit about

on shelf availability, and specifically food freshness, I

think you've got some pretty interesting concept about some

of the things that are going on, forget about GS1 for a second,

just the the challenges of food and food waste, etc. It's a big

deal people, we throw away a lot of product that we probably

don't want to throw away. So walk us through what some of the

opportunities in the in the food waste area are.

I'd be happy to do that. So every year,

according to the United Nations Environment Program, report from

year 2021. About About a billion over a billion metric tons of

food is wasted. And actually the report breaks it down by how

much of that waste is contributed by food service, and

how much by retail. So when you combine that, you see that 363

million tons of food is wasted from retail and food service

alone every year, which is pretty incredible. So there's a

huge opportunity in the trillions, if you will,

opportunity to, to solve this problem with standardization and

technology. Right in order to you just reduce that, and you

have a huge win. Everybody wins. When you reduce food waste.

There's so many kind of implications and ripple effects

of that waste to be an environmental impact and costs

to businesses. impacts on customer safety, food safety and

whatnot. I was just thinking when I was traveling back was an

airport about a month ago. And I wasn't a quick serve restaurant,

it was kind of a sit down place. But I ordered a yogurt, you

know, and it was like one of those granola yogurt kind of

combo things. And it had a little like expiration like a

sticker on it. And the sticker had been scratched right at the

month. And it was old. It was a month old. But somebody had kind

of scratched the top of the sticker and I was like this is I

mean, I could still eat it. But I was like no. This is and it

was it was such an anecdote because I had just come to from

a meeting talking about food safety and expiration.

Now Jonathan Gregory is in the hospital because of

botulism for three weeks, right? Yeah.

But, yeah. tons of waste. And also, you

know, the regulatory elements that are drivers, right so FISMA

rule 204 I think And, you know, your audience probably is aware

of this, right? So the requirement to trace the

movement, the batch lot, the, the origin of where you got

this, this item, when you receive items when you transform

them, and when you ship them, and be able to turn that

information around very quickly. So that's an interesting driver.

But I would say with regards to RFID, that is one of many

drivers. It's not only from a regulatory perspective, there's

all that opportunity with regards to waste reduction. And

then just to not to go on too long. But But inventory

management, just the kind of the blocking and tackling of

inventory management slowing your safety stock, which which

lowers your working capital, reducing labor, specifically

reducing really monotonous things, that somebody want to

have to go count this thing, dealing with product pairings or

dynamic demand creation. So being able to offer limited time

offers when you see excess inventory to be able to move

that digitally, quick serve restaurant, digital signboards,

things like that the ability to do those, there's just a really

exciting way when you connect the, the, the serialized data

that you can receive in to action to respond to it.

Yeah, well, I'm looking at your slide here.

Let's let's double click on just just a little bit before we get

into the solution. So you've got 5% of all foodservice is waste

and 2% is retail waste. Okay, so it's 2024. Jonathan, it seems to

be you ought to be able to pick strawberries in the field, and

get it all the way to a customer table without throwing it away.

What are some of the major levers of why this food waste

occurs in the supply chain?

The why of food waste? You know, that's a

big question, Mike, and ,,,

But it's gonna, it's gonna lead into the solutions

that you're coming up with about just knowing for example, what

is what what cases strawberry? Should I put on the shelf?

There's three of them here. Do I just grab the first one or? So

I'm looking for: what are some of the causes of waste that you

guys put RFID standards in place to solve?

So think of 17 year old John Gregory here

working at a quick serve restaurant or restaurant? Right?

17 year old John Gregory goes in at 430 in the morning to go prep

some material for the next day shift to wash some lettuce or to

do what have you, right. Seventeen year old John Gregory

may not be the best, most reliable person to make sure

that the the right item is picked to be checked for, say is

recalled, or is this one has the newest or the latest expiration

date, if you will. And so really part of this is the human factor

of managing the picking. And so if you can automate and provide

mechanisms that that mistake proof those processes, that's

one big, big reason, in 17 genre, great could be in a

distribution center. And so potentially picking something

that's going to expire, you know, a week from now when

something next to it is going to expire a day from now or what

have you. So part of it is just the flow. And really, it's the

availability of data. Another point is that, oftentimes, we've

had anecdotes where back end systems data, you know, if I

generate data, and I share it with a trade partner, and it

goes through multiple systems, guess what, you know, systems

have vulnerabilities at times where the data can be

inadvertently corrupted in some way, right. And what we found is

that the barcode data is a shining example of great data

quality, because the barcode is encoded at that point of

manufacture. And it's really indelible. It's almost like a

blockchain in a sense, in the sense that it's, it's not widely

distributed, but it's right there. And it can be changed,

you can't like put another line in the barcode and change its

value. And so the reliability of that is really substantial. And

yet the bar code doesn't offer a non line of sight, you have to

say de palletize. Say, for example, meat, right? There are

many examples where distribution centers receive a pallet of of

meat cases, and they have to de palletize simply to barcode scan

each case, and then they re palletize it. So they did that

just to get the data where the RFID technology offers the non

line of sight. So allows you to capture that data and reduce

that labor.

Got it. So talk to us a little bit about in the

food versus apparel; apparel is a serialized item. So it's the

UP I call it the G 10. And the serialization. There's

additional data you can put in there provide attributes for

food type products specifically. So talk to us a little bit about

how GS1 is working standards that allow that to occur.

Yeah, Mike that the interesting thing I

want to harken back to one of the first calls I was on when it

joined us, when us about five years ago, connected a major

leading retailer, apparel retailer, with major leading,

quick serve restaurants, I won't name names, but and in that call

the retailer because apparel was first right Apparel has deployed

RFID in large part and has seen great success with it. And so it

was interesting to hear these executives who really were kind

of the glue of allowing these folks to talk and to hear them

talk about, hey, here are all the benefits we see. And we can

see the quick serve Restaurant Group getting excited, like,

wow, we could really use this right. But it begs the question,

what's the difference between apparel general merchandise and

food, for example, a farmer right. And that is the date that

the velocity of the of the products are moving much faster,

and you have to manage that date. So it's a different core

business requirement, you know, sweaters not really expiring.

But you know, a case of tomatoes is, right. And so the challenge

was the existing structures for the data structures were great

for apparel, but they didn't really serve the needs of food

service in that they didn't put the date value into the RFID

tag. You say, Well, I can just put that on the cloud, can't I?

Well, you can but when you look at how fractured and if that's

the right word, how diverse the the, the food industry is, you

know, the fortune 500 nonprofit group had, had looked at a

burger and fries and packaging in Europe. And they evaluate and

they said that the content of that could come from up to 75

different supply chains. Why? So it's mind blowing, right to

think of the number of places that food is sourced from the

shape of the, the food industry is different than apparel like,

you know, a retailer might know, okay, they might have their own

distribution center. And they might have their own even

factories or their have series of national brands. And it's a

shortlist. Whereas in the food space, you have a whole lot of

farms all over the globe, focusing all that product into

the distributors. And so really the distributors are kind of

those, those key points. More so you're buying from a distributor

than from a farm as a quick serve restaurant or what have

you. Um, so sort of the diversity of the of the number

of participants suggests that, you know, putting the data in

the cloud could be incredibly difficult to do to be able to

get to quickly. But if I can put this core data into the RFID tag

itself, then that, that allows me to manage the product kind of

on the edge and I believe makes the solution scalable.

Well, the the other practical example is you get in

environments that are very, very difficult to get any kind of

connectivity from an energy standpoint. So I'm in a freezer

cooler, which is a complete metal box. Good luck getting Wi

Fi signal, right. So you have to have some of that offline on the

devices itself. Because you're never gonna get to the cloud, if

you're in the back of a cooler trying to do which one of these

should I mark down? Right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And along those lines,

like a cooler example, or a distribution center conveyor,

right? Where we've seen this demonstrated where hey, I can, I

can on the edge, that conveyor system can read the expiration

date of the RFID tag and divert any item that's closer to expiry

to be consumed more quickly, for example. And that logic doesn't

require a call up to a cloud where, hey, where where might

the data be? Where, where's my data source? It's the data is

right there, the moment and responding?

Well, maybe, maybe help help unpack for us for

we'll go a little bit deeper in the tech because I think it's

important, but give us the structure of what a normal

apparel tag information would look like the information that's

actually in the tag, versus the kind of information you'd have

for that same thing for a food product, because because I think

there's some similarities, but there's some additional things

that are available for food, right?

Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. Mike. So the

SG 1096, not to geek out on you're here. Right? That is the

encoding scheme very widely, is very widely used. You go into a

retailer, big box store, just about anywhere that you're

reading an RFID tag. There's a very, very high usage of this SG

1096 encoding scheme. What is the encoding scheme, encode it

encodes the G 10, the Global Trade Item number, which is the

same data that is encoded in the UPC barcode or the EIN barcode

If you're in Europe, right, so you have your G 10, and your

serial number, right? Now, what that allows is the G 10 contains

just like your UPC barcode and contains a GS1 company prefix,

which means that you have a licensed company identifier. So

you have a globally unique product described. And then you

have a globally unique product instance, when you sterilize

that you have this particular shirt, right, that I that I pick

up, has a unique identity. No other item in the world has that

same sterilized identity. Okay. So that works really well for

apparel. But when we contrast that to what do I need for food

-

Let me stop you for a second. And going back to our

original standards example, this particular format, can you be

used ubiquitously across all the retailers: Walmart, Target

Macy's, whoever is doing RFID they can read that same

information, they don't have to have a different scheme for the

retailer. Right?

Exactly. And like I said, at the beginning,

like GS1 US or GS1 is all over the world, right? Alright. So

you don't have to be just in the US to read an SG 296 You're

gonna read it anywhere in the globe. So you're gonna go to

Europe, you're going to go to the Far East to Africa, and

you're going to read the same data structure, which is really,

really helpful. So it's this common language applied.