Key Takeaways:
- RAIN RFID technology is revolutionizing inventory management, sustainability, and operational efficiency across industries like retail and logistics.
- The EU’s Digital Product Passport initiative leverages RAIN RFID for lifetime traceability, enhancing sustainability and compliance in product lifecycles.
RFID technology actively shapes how businesses track, manage, and optimize their physical assets. As production costs drop and global standards unify, this technology continues to unlock new capabilities across diverse industries. Companies use RFID to reduce waste, improve customer experiences, and drive sustainability initiatives on a global scale.
To understand the future of this vital technology, we explored its most pressing advancements and challenges in a comprehensive discussion with RAIN Alliance President & CEO, Aileen Ryan, and members of the technical committee of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) RFID Conference Dan Dobkin and Brian Degnan. The 2026 IEEE RFID Conference will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 16-18, focused on the scientific and technical issues in the industry.
The interview delved into the evolution of passive and active RFID technologies, the technical hurdles facing adoption in sectors like grocery and the crucial role of RFID in the European Union’s upcoming Digital Product Passport initiative.
RFID Journal: What are the primary differences between active and passive RFID technologies?
Aileen Ryan, Dan Dobkin and Brian Degnan: Passive RFID does not have an onboard power source; the RFID tags harvest energy from the radio frequency field emitted by the reader. The most common tags, compliant with ISO 18000-6C/63 and widely known as RAIN RFID, operate in the 860-960 MHz band, but passive devices are also used at 13.56 MHz (HF) and 130 kHz frequencies. Passive RFID can be extremely inexpensive (often just a few cents at scale), thin, and durable, but read range is limited, from a few centimeters for HF to about 10-20 meters for RAIN (also known as UHF) RFID.
Active RFID tags, by contrast, are equipped with a battery, enabling continuous transmission, longer read ranges (up to hundreds of meters), and more sophisticated onboard sensing, but with significantly higher cost and finite battery life.
RFID Journal: How has the adoption of RAIN RFID impacted the retail industry, particularly in apparel and footwear?
Aileen Ryan: RAIN RFID has transformed inventory accuracy in apparel and footwear retail. Before widespread adoption, retailers typically achieved inventory accuracy of around 65-75%. With item-level RAIN RFID tagging, many retailers now report accuracy above 95-99%, reducing out-of-stock events, shrinkage losses, and manual cycle counts. Retailers like Walmart, Target, Nordstrom, Zara, H&M, Macy’s, and Levi’s have deployed RAIN RFID at scale. Retailers who have deployed RAIN RFID have been able to unlock omnichannel (buy online/pickup or ship from store) capabilities that would otherwise require significant overstock buffers or result in frequent fulfillment failures. The apparel sector remains the single largest vertical for RAIN RFID deployment by tag volume.
How Walmart Impacts the RFID Industry
RFID Journal: What role did Walmart play in the early adoption and standardization of UHF RFID technology?
Ryan: Walmart played an important and well-documented role in building early commercial momentum for UHF RFID. In 2003, Walmart issued a mandate requiring its top 100 suppliers to apply RFID tags to pallets and cases by January 2005. This sent a clear market signal that accelerated investment and helped build the supplier ecosystem that would later enable item-level deployment. Subsequently, the RAIN Alliance, GS1, AIM Global and other industry, standards, and retail efforts transformed a promising technology into a global standard.
RFID Journal: What factors contributed to the success of passive RFID in logistics and warehouse management?
Ryan: Several converging factors drove adoption. First, RAIN RFID tag costs dropped dramatically over time, from over a dollar per tag in the early 2000s to pennies for high-volume orders today, making large-scale deployment economically viable. Second, the EPC global Gen 2 / ISO 18000-63 standard ensured that readers from different vendors could communicate with RAIN RFID tags from any manufacturer. Finally, RAIN RFID enables reading hundreds of tags simultaneously without line-of-sight, dramatically speeding up receiving, put-away, and shipping operations versus barcode scanning. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global supply chain crisis also proved to be a significant accelerant.
RFID Journal: What challenges have prevented the widespread adoption of RFID for automated bulk checkout in grocery stores? How can passive RFID technology be expanded to address food waste and spoilage detection?
Ryan: Grocery has lagged behind apparel for several interconnected reasons. Metal and liquid packaging significantly degrade RAIN RFID read performance, requiring more specialized tag and antenna designs, and line-of-sight in many cases. The economics are also harder: low-margin grocers cannot readily absorb even a five-cent tag cost. Produce and fresh items add further complexity due to irregular shapes and high moisture content. Grocery SKU proliferation and supplier fragmentation are also challenging.
Progress is being made on the technical side. In October 2025, Walmart and Avery Dennison brought RAIN RFID sensor technology to Walmart’s meat, bakery, and deli departments, enabling associates to manage inventory rotation and markdown decisions automatically.
Why RFID Plays a Key Role in DPP
RFID Journal: How has the integration of RFID technology improved inventory management in retail stores?
Ryan: RAIN RFID enables retailers to conduct full store inventory counts in hours rather than days. Real-time visibility allows stores to replenish the sales floor proactively rather than reactively, and enables accurate data for omnichannel orders.
RAIN RFID allows retailers to carry less inventory overall. Because retailers have real-time visibility into exactly what they have and where it is, lower levels of safety stock are acceptable, reducing working capital and decreasing markdowns.
Loss prevention is enhanced through EAS (electronic article surveillance) integration. Some retailers use RAIN RFID to enable self-checkout and smart fitting rooms. Collectively, these capabilities reduce carrying costs, improve sell-through rates, and elevate the customer experience.
RFID Journal: How does the Digital Product Passport initiative in the EU aim to enhance lifetime traceability of retail objects?
Ryan: The EU’s Digital Product Passport (DPP), established under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), requires manufacturers to provide a machine-readable identifier linked to a structured data record covering a product’s materials, origin, repairability, recyclability, and carbon footprint. RAIN RFID is a natural and approved data carrier technology for the DPP identifier. The tag’s EPC provides a unique, persistent ID that survives the product’s life and can be read at any point in the supply chain or product lifecycle.
The DPP framework begins rolling out for batteries and textiles in 2026-2027, with broader product categories following. For manufacturers and retailers already deploying RAIN RFID for operational purposes, DPP compliance represents an opportunity to leverage existing infrastructure.
What Impact Does RFID Play in Sustainability Efforts?
RFID Journal: What are the environmental implications of scaling RAIN RFID tag production to 2 trillion tags per year?
Ryan, Dobkin and Degnan: Current passive tag technologies use a silicon integrated circuit attached to a substrate, with printed metallic structures to form an antenna. The substrate is typically plastic with optional adhesive back surface, and the top surface may have a printed identification such as a bar or QR code. The direct environmental impact of RFID tag manufacturing is primarily in the integrated circuit. The silicon integrated circuits used in tags are very small; 2 trillion tags per year would employ less than 1% of the expected semiconductor industry in (say) 2035, so the direct environmental impact is modest although not zero.
In contrast, the operational benefits of RAIN RFID represent a substantial positive environmental offset. Reduced overproduction, more accurate inventory, smarter markdown decisions, and better reverse logistics all contribute to a meaningful reduction in waste. This full lifecycle contribution must be weighed alongside tag production footprint in any complete environmental assessment.
RFID Journal: How has the use of barcodes and QR codes evolved alongside RFID technology in retail?
Ryan: Rather than being displaced, barcodes and QR codes have evolved into complementary layers of the item identification stack alongside RAIN RFID. The 1D barcode remains ubiquitous for POS and supply chain applications and is extremely low cost to print. The QR code, which is smartphone-readable and capable of encoding a URL, has become a consumer-facing channel for product information. GS1’s “Sunrise 2027” initiative is driving the transition from traditional 1D barcodes to 2D symbols (QR codes carrying a GS1 Digital Link) at POS, enabling the same code to serve both scanner and consumer smartphone use cases.
Looking ahead, RAIN-enabled smartphones will further blur the distinction between these technologies from a consumer perspective. As smartphones gain native RAIN RFID reading capability, consumers will be able to access the same rich product information, provenance, sustainability data, care instructions, brand experiences, from a RAIN tag that they currently access via a QR code scan.
RFID Journal: What are the key obstacles to achieving universal lifetime identification of manufactured items using RFID?
Ryan, Dobkin and Degnan: For durable goods, tag survivability is improving through advances in encapsulation and materials. However, making tags that survive not merely shelving and distribution but use of an item can increase the cost of the tag, impacting retail returns for benefits mainly accruing to the larger society. Tag integrated circuits that retain information for long periods of time (>5 years or so) are more expensive than standard commercial tag IC’s.
On the data infrastructure side, the interoperable ecosystems needed to maintain live records tied to tag must be built. Regional frequency allocations and data models must be addressed. The RAIN Alliance, GS1, and ISO are working together on these issues.
Privacy considerations around consumer-carried tagged items are being addressed through a combination of industry guidelines and policy engagement, but are complex social issues and may be an important obstacle to lifetime identification.
What is the Importance of the AI, IoT and RFID for the Future
RFID Journal: How can advancements in automated location capabilities enhance the value of RFID tagging?
Ryan: Combined with computer vision, RAIN RFID location data and AI analytics create a powerful sensor fusion layer for autonomous retail and warehouse environments, where robots, replenishment systems, and inventory management tools operate with a level of situational awareness that was not achievable even a few years ago.
RFID Journal: How might AI-powered RAIN RFID and IoT systems shape the future of RFID technology?
Ryan: AI creates a step-change in the value extracted from RAIN RFID data. Machine learning models can distinguish meaningful events from RF artifacts, predict stockout risk from read-pattern anomalies before a shelf is actually empty, and optimize RAIN RFID reader network configurations dynamically.
In omnichannel retail, AI uses RAIN RFID inventory data to optimize fulfillment routing and forecast demand at the item level. In fresh grocery, AI with RAIN RFID sensor data enables automated freshness monitoring and dynamic markdown pricing. In logistics, AI correlates RAIN RFID data with external signals to enable predictive supply chain management. In loss prevention, behavioral AI applied to RAIN tag movement patterns surfaces organized retail crime patterns. AI will process and interpret DPP data at scale, identifying patterns in product lifecycle data that can inform more sustainable design decisions.
Longer term, AI agents managing RAIN RFID-instrumented environments, autonomously directing robots, reordering inventory, routing returns, and optimizing sustainability outcomes, represent the convergence of RAIN RFID’s physical-layer sensing with AI’s decision-making capability. The result is a self-managing physical operations stack, where the visibility provided by RAIN RFID becomes the sensory layer of an intelligent, increasingly autonomous system.