Startup Says It Has Cost-Effective Means to RFID-Enable Packaging

But do box manufacturers currently see enough demand for RFID-enabled boxes to justify the costs of integrating RFID tags into their products? While the additional costs of deploying Hide-Pack's RFID system on a packaging line could be amortized to less than a penny per box when used to RFID-enable 20 million boxes, CPG firms are not presently creating a demand for more than 2 or 3 million RFID-enabled boxes per year, says Dwain Farley, CEO for the Americas division at Domino IGS. Still, he notes, this demand should grow consistently as Wal-Mart and other retailers begin asking suppliers to ship an increasing number of products in RFID-tagged cases each year. What's more, Farley states, box makers wouldn't need to dedicate a line to producing only RFID-enabled boxes, since the Hide-Pack system can be turned on and off quickly.

A number of box-makers are already engaged with Domino on pilot projects, Farley says, though non-discloser agreements preclude him from sharing company names. There is particularly strong interest, he adds, from makers of the wax-covered corrugate used for shipping produce, because the readability of RFID-enabled labels slapped to the outside of boxes carrying water-rich produce has been a major hurdle for produce companies. The placement of the inlay embedded in the box joint, he says, improves the tag's readability.

According to Farley, being encased within the box joint adhesive fortifies the RFID inlays from water damage. The company performed tests in which its boxes were soaked in water or placed inside freezers, neither of which prevented the tags from being consistently readable as they were moved down conveyor systems at speeds of up to 600 feet per minute—the target speed for tag readability at Wal-Mart distribution centers.

Hide-Pack has tested its approach with a variety of package-making equipment, used to manufacture everything from large corrugate boxes to smaller product-level packages (such as thinner cartons used for facial tissue, cereal boxes or other products) and envelopes (think FedEx). The company claims the system works with all of these types of packaging.

While testing the system with a corrugate box-making line using a Flexo Folder Gluer (the dominant system used in manufacturing corrugate cases), Hide-Pack has been able to insert an inlay into each box moving through the gluer at speeds of up to 18,000 units per hour. This, according to François Bozet, vice president of technology for Hide-Pack, is the maximum line speed of most Flexo Folder Gluer machinery.

Because its system tests each inlay to ensure its functionality before applying it to the box, Hide-Pack says the tags in finished boxes have a failure rate of 0.1 percent or less. It has also tested its method with various types of adhesives, as well as with passive UHF EPC Gen 2 inlays from eight tag makers. In addition, the company has performed tests at a recycling mill, which reportedly showed that the RFID inlay, despite being embedded into the box seam, could be extracted from the corrugate using standard contaminant-extraction filters already in use at corrugate recycling mills. (These same filters currently remove RFID labels from the outside of corrugate boxes.)