Produce Growers and Container Coalition Conduct RFID Field Test

The growers are using a combination of Motorola, Alien and Impinj interrogators, McCartney says. "In theory, the readers shouldn't make any difference," he states. "We haven't seen anything we could measure that would say one reader is different than another."

According to McCartney, the shipments will each take about 45 to 60 days. In June 2008, QLM intends to provide a white paper to RPCC, which will then make the report available to the public at no cost.

"The question we are seeking to answer is whether a single-use RFID tag can be used multiple times," McCartney explains. "We have a returnable system reusing the containers [and the tags] hundreds or thousands of times. We want to see if the tags under these conditions are still readable and rewriteable."

Specifically, McCartney notes, "We hope to find out which tags work, were the tags able to survive the cycle, where the right placement is for tags." If the tags are found to be reusable, he says, they could save growers thousands of dollars that would otherwise be required for RFID printers to continually print new labels. The pilot is testing only RFID hardware rather than middleware or software, he adds. The interrogators used during the field test will store the EPC numbers of the tags they read and encode, and the results will be transferred to Excel spreadsheets.

"I'm really excited about this pilot," McCartney says. "There has hardly been any work done at this scale and level of complexity [on reusable containers]." Eventually, he adds, he'd like to see reusable containers built with embedded RFID tags.