Metro Sees Progress With Its Frozen-Foods Pilot

At the pallet level, Metro has already made substantial progress with its RFID rollout. Internally, the retailer is tagging 100 percent of its own pallets that are delivered from one distribution center to all its Cash & Carry stores. Metro has now turned most of its testing efforts to case- and item-level tagging. "Pallet tagging is not our goal," Plenge said.

Since July 2006, the company has been testing case-level tagging on pallets full of mixed cases. Tags are applied at one distribution center in Essen, Germany, and goods are tracked as they move to a specific store in Rheinberg. Plenge said Metro has achieved a 95 percent read rate there as well. The 5 percent of unread items, he explained, are comprised of products that interfere with RF signals, such as cans of dog food, plastic bottles of liquids or items that can detune a tag, such as jars of jam.

The company has gotten around this problem, Plenge told the audience, by adjusting the positioning of tags on the cases and persuading producers to adapt their products for RFID. For instance, Milka, a chocolate maker, changed its chocolate bars' packaging from foil to plastic, alleviating the read-interference problem Metro had been experiencing.

Plenge said he expects Metro to be able to use case-level tagging in its operations in the third or fourth quarter of 2008. At the item level, the company recently embarked on a pilot testing tagged men's clothes at a department store in Essen (see Metro Group's Galeria Kaufhof Launches UHF Item-Level Pilot).