Digital Services Company Brings DPP Compliance with QR, NFC or RFID

Published: September 25, 2024
  • Retailer Tesco is using a solution from Fabacus to comply with anticipated DPP product traceability requirements, using QR codes
  • Fabacus is in conversation with companies to use RFID or RFID and NFC hybrid solutions to track inventory as well as meet Europe’s DPP and ESPR requirements

Since its launching six years ago, global data and technology company Fabacus has offered retailers and brands a service and software platform, including licensing. So the company found itself already embedded in the world of identifying the products its customers make and sell when the European Commission prepared a new dictate for digital product passports (DPPs).

The UK company is now leveraging that experience in product licensing to offer retailers and brands with unique identification to meet pending DPP traceability requirements. Retailer Tesco is the most recent company to be piloting the solution—known as Xelacore—to gain unique, item level identification for garments, in compliance with DPP requirements, using QR codes.

In the next few years, the European Commission will be requiring DPPs for several categories of products, beginning with batteries and textiles to provide a digital history of each product from manufacture to recycling. There are still many details to be determined around DPP compliance including what kinds of technologies to best identify products, and how the data can be made universally categorized and made accessible.

Fabacus Creates DPP Compliance Platform

Fabacus plans to offer its solution for tracking and tracing specific products through a circular economy by using RFID and NFC technology as well as QR codes.

In fact, said Andrew Xeni, Fabacus founder and CEO, the company is now in discussion with several companies that are already using RFID technology for inventory tracking to leverage Fabacus’ solution to use those tags to meet DPP requirements.

In the meantime, multiple brands and retailers are deploying Xelacore with QR codes on labels, to access unified data about the product’s materials, and manufacturing history. The Tesco deployment consists of QR codes that connect shoppers with digital data related to the company’s F&F clothing range.

Boosting Sustainability with a Product’s Life Story

In addition to DPP, European retailers must comply with a July mandate from the European Commission: the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), aimed at improving sustainability and circularity of products within the European Union market.

To meet the requirements of both ESPR and DPP, companies must provide accessible and detailed information about a product’s life story, including its environmental impact based on materials, repair instructions, disposal, and recycling methods as well as lifecycle impact.

The system from Fabacus integrates and displays this information for Tesco and its shoppers, digitally, ensuring accessibility to anyone buying, using or transporting the goods.

Background in Licensing

Initially, Fabacus launched as a solution focused on the licensing industry for brands and retailers that license their intellectual property (IP). By creating a system of record for each new product, customers gain visibility and control over the products that carry their trademarks, logos or other imagery. The Fabacus solution protects their IP and revenue, helps prevent counterfeit products and makes it easier for companies to manufacture goods in large quantities and advertise their products to large audiences.

Fabacus then creates a structured, trusted registry of all of those licensed consumer products across all categories, globally.

“In the past year, we have been discovering a wider opportunity that no one globally was addressing,” said Xeni: namely the need for a software platform from which members of a product’s value chain could access DPP or sustainability data. “So we set out to solve that problem.”

Building a Platform for DPP

Over the last few years, the company began remaking itself as a provider of DPP compliance as well as licensing. “The technology we built actually lends itself incredibly well to solving the problem that is going to become more and more prominent as the DPP legislation comes into force,” he said.

Starting in 2023, the company began working with large retailers with several different models. Some sell their own branded products across multiple categories, some sell third-party brands, and, in other cases, the retailers license out their intellectual property to other companies that  Xeni said include “a very complex myriad of consumer products.” All were seeking ways to capture and manage DPP data about their products.

With its new model, Fabacus is extending its service to help these large organizations create structured product registers for all of their products and any related product attributes. Those can include environmental, social and governance (ESG) compliance to conform to EU requirements or customer expectations.

Structured Digital Product Catalog

“We sit in the middle of all of their existing systems and create this structured catalogue to truly deliver scalable digital product passports,” explained Xeni, so that they can generate the actual unique identifier itself and populate it with DPP compliant data.

What that consists of is a software-based structured product catalogue with all the data one place that allows the brand to publish that data to the carrier.

Last year the company offered its solution to fashion retailer Nobody’s Child in the form of a QR code that customers can scan to view details about the product’s history including materials, manufacturing processes, logistics and sustainability. It can include, Xeni said, a unique serialized URL for that product with over 180 data points.

RFID and NFC Poised to Improve Experience

While QR codes are the most immediate and low-cost solution to DPP data access, Fabacus is planning deployments that may leverage UHF RFID tags. Already, many garments have RFID tags attached to them for inventory management purposes. The tags are read throughout the supply chain and in stores, to identify their location and therefore the inventory status.

Since RFID tags are frequently updating data about a product automatically, they create an opportunity for DPP requirements as well.

However, because consumers would also need access to DPP data and they do not carry RFID readers, Xeni said he expects to see RFID tags used in conjunction with QR codes or NFC tags that can be read with a mobile phone.

Gaining Efficiency of Data Collection with RFID

When it comes to measuring environmental impact of the products and refining that understand with information about sales, inventory and distribution, RFID offers a unique benefit, Xeni said.

If RFID tags are read at distribution centers, or as they enter or leave other sites, “you can start to use those data points to contribute to the environmental impact of that product and its journey into store and essentially into a consumer’s possession,” he said.

While the EU Commission may dictate the framework for the new requirements, “we will be the enablers,” stated Xeni.

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About the Author: Claire Swedberg