Beaver Street Fisheries also has been using the portable tagging station to test tag performance on a variety of seafood at different temperatures. If a frozen shipment should begin to thaw, water condensation could build up on RFID labels and impact read rates on individual cases on a pallet. That’s because water absorbs radio waves at ultra-high frequencies and interferes with getting a reading. The same is not true of ice. “It’s not the temperature but the state of matter that makes a difference,” says the University of Florida’s Welt. “Ice is a lot less absorbent than water. Tags can be read freely in blocks of ice.” Stockdale says the company is monitoring the issue, but so far condensation hasn’t been a problem.

For some still unknown reason, the company found that radio signals can be read more easily on cases of certain types of fish. “On some pallets, we will be able to read the inner cases, depending on the product,” says Stockdale. “Snapper, for instance, reads better than grouper.” The company has been experimenting with pallet configurations and tag placement on the cases inside those pallets. The product lines that Beaver Street Fisheries is currently shipping to Wal-Mart with RFID tags all have different pallet configurations. A pallet of breaded jumbo shrimp holds 60 cases, while a pallet of snow crab holds only 27 cases.


In the coming months, Beaver Street Fisheries plans to add to and change some of the products it’s shipping to Wal-Mart, based on different items or RFID tags the company wants to test. Stockdale says the company will phase in tagging of other product lines it ships to Wal-Mart over the next few months and expects to comply with the retailer’s January 2006 deadline for full compliance. The next phase of Beaver Street Fisheries’ implementation—automatic labeling—should help the company meet those goals.

Improving efficiency
Beaver Street Fisheries’ RFID team understood early on that phase two—automatically applying RFID labels to cases before they are assembled into pallets—is essential to reduce the amount of time and the number of workers it takes to tag cases. The company hasn’t yet decided which product to test first, but it will likely be one of the company’s Sea Best products destined for Wal-Mart. Stockdale expects that the automatic RFID labeling system will be up and running on the seafood processing plant’s assembly line by the end of March.

Stockdale says vendors Zebra, Franwell and Quadrel, a label applicator manufacturer, are now building an automatic RFID labeling station to install alongside a conveyor belt, using RFID software developed by Beaver Street Fisheries. Before cases go down the conveyor belt, workers will manually enter the product type inside the cases so the appropriate product information will be encoded onto the RFID tag and printed on the bar code. Sensors will determine the weight of each case and communicate that information to a computer running the software. The software will incorporate weight and other product information and generate a serial number for the RFID tag. Then the Zebra R110 printer will encode a Class 1 tag and print a label, which will include a bar code. The printer will read the tag to make sure it was encoded properly. If the tag is good, a Quadrel automatic label applicator will apply the RFID label to a case. If the tag is dead, the applicator will reject it, and the software will instruct the Zebra R110 to issue a new label. If the new tag successfully emits a response to the reader, it will be applied to the case.