By Mary Catherine O'Connor

Feb. 1, 2007—When Wal-Mart and other retailers first issued tagging mandates, many suppliers responded by tagging RF-friendly products. But as suppliers scale up their RFID deployments—either to meet growing tagging requirements or to gain internal advantages—they'll need to tag cases of soup, soda and other canned products, which are hard to read because metal reflects RF signals.

It's possible to make an RFID smart label that can be read in a metal-heavy environment by adding foam to the label's substrate, between the inlay and the adhesive. The foam provides a buffer that prevents the metal from interfering with the RF signal from the interrogator. But the foam also makes the smart label too thick to run through a conventional printer-encoder, which increases time and labor costs.

The Omni-ID tag uses a conductive substrate that creates an electromagnetic field around the chip when the tag is interrogated.

Now, several innovative solutions promise to make it easier to read UHF Gen 2 passive smart labels on cases of metal products. Last summer, ADASA introduced the Foam Attach Tag (FAT), a 4-by-1/2-inch foam-backed smart label that fits into its PAD3500 encoder, which can be worn on a belt and links to a user's network via Wi-Fi. The PAD3500 does not print on the labels, it only encodes an Electronic Product Code to the inlay embedded in each. The labels are hand-applied to cases that already carry bar-coded shipping labels. ADASA is currently working with an end user on a pilot program to test how FATs work on its hard-to-tag products.