- Key growth areas include tire tracking, logistics, food, drugs and textiles
- Pending legislation around European and U.S. goods sales, as well as sustainability, are accelerating adoption
- AI and GenAI will be part of the further development to leverage RFID data
The UHF RAIN RFID industry has seen significant growth over the last year, but experienced some challenges that may be addressed in the coming calendar year—highlighted by new legislative requirements around traceability for food and consumer products that RFID is poised to support.
Apparel tracking continues its trajectory with UHF RFID tags on goods, while logistics and food are seeing growth. UPS announced its deployment of RFID for parcel tracking, Qualcomm is building a chip that could integrate UHF RAIN RFID into phones. Kroger’s adoption of RFID in its bakeries may signal one of the largest such roll outs in the food industry.
When it comes to challenges, a petition filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by Nextnav for access to the same bandwidth used in the U.S. by UHF RAIN RFID as well as LoRaWAN and other IoT devices, resulted in 1,800 plus responses from the industry. The FCC has not yet ruled on that petition.
In the meantime, the industry growth continues. A RAIN Alliance report in spring of this year found that 44.8 billion RAIN RFID tag ICs were produced in 2023. Many include consumer products such as tires, pharmaceuticals, a variety of consumer products sold by retailers such as Walmart, and a growing percentage of apparel and footwear.
Key Growth in Food
Over the past year, “we’ve seen significant advancements and key wins in leveraging real-time, item-level visibility solutions,” said Chris Tague, Seagull Software’s head of industry solutions. He pointed to adoption in the food industry, as well as the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) FSMA 204 requirement in the U.S., indicating a broader need for full traceability.
“[Seagull’s] customers are moving toward systems that deliver operational transparency, enabling better decisions and faster responses to recalls or disruptions,” said Tague. “These systems not only support compliance but also improve sustainability by optimizing inventory and reducing waste.”
Beyond food and consumer goods, RFID continues to serve brands and retailers with a way to improve inventory management, automate workflows, and enable targeted use cases like shrink reduction and process optimization in stores.
“These trends demonstrate a growing shift toward integrated, visibility-driven solutions that go beyond compliance and deliver tangible business value,” said Tague.
Legislation Globally
In fact, beyond legislation, he said, “the food industry is increasingly…focusing on achieving end-to-end traceability to enhance operational efficiency, streamline recalls, and ensure transparency throughout the supply chain.”
Sustainability is the goal for the EU’s initiative Digital Product Passports (DPP) to encourage product circularity and transparency across industries, from food to consumer goods. These initiatives are setting new benchmarks for traceability and sustainability.
“These developments underscore a shift from a compliance-first mindset to one prioritizing full visibility and resilience, with companies leveraging technology to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape,” said Tague.
Manufacturing, Logistics, Cold Chain and More
Tague finds the adoption of real-time, item-level visibility solutions in manufacturing and logistics has accelerated. Companies are leveraging these technologies to enhance operational efficiency, improve inventory accuracy and reduce downtime. Such efforts are becoming more global as integration of RFID in logistics has enabled better coordination of international supply chains, helping to address lingering challenges from past disruptions.
And retail has continued to grow as a strong vertical for RFID, with new use cases emerging. Tague pointed out that beyond inventory management and shrink reduction, retailers are exploring RFID for customer experience enhancements, like seamless self-checkout and personalized shopping.
New Research and Development
The past 12 months have provided milestones, innovation, customer wins and adoption growth for technology company Beontag, said Suchi Srinivasan, the company’s global VP of Digital Transformation Enabler (DTE) business.
To meet the rising demand, Beontag invested in two new facilities—in Tampere, Finland, and in Dayton, Ohio—centered around innovation, research and development. Both facilities are intended to deliver on the company’s business ambitions. The goal is to provide industry growth centers around end-market applications and consumers in retail, to manufacturing and advanced logistics, Srinivasan said.
“RFID and NFC tag [passive, 13.54MHz technology] are being viewed as non-negotiable tools to help companies achieve sustainability commitments and contribute better to the circular economy,” according to Srinivasan.
Beontag’s mission is to help the technology serve almost any traceability or certification requirement, depending on the software solution. “Ultimately, RFID and NFC will continue to do their job in creating the link between products and data, whether in tires and batteries or luxury products and apparel, and data is the key to more sustainable decisions in any business,” she said.
Rise in AI
The growth of AI this year, in all parts of technology, serves to deliver greater value to RFID deployments as the high volume of data from RFID is needed by the AI system itself.
“From a trends perspective, we … see the global rise of AI adoption as something that can be a great asset to our industry,” Srinivasan said. Anything that will help to enhance efficiencies and streamline the capabilities of software solutions will play a significant role in easing the burden of many businesses who feel the disclosure and tracking requirements are getting out of hand.
The company is exploring applications across businesses and sectors and looks forward to working with clients to further leverage AI along with RFID technology to solve problems.
Beontag is among many RFID companies that are leveraging the mutual benefits that AI and RFID bring to each other. Technology firm Zebra is another example, as Randy Dunn, Zebra’s customer success director, stated Generative AI requires enormous amounts of data for training models. The fact that RFID can help generate both “more data” and “more accurate data” has caught the attention of the big tech players this year, Dunn pointed out.
NextNav’s FCC Petition
One action that could serve to compete with RFID technology is a petition before the FCC by terrestrial navigation company NextNav. With Docket 24-240, NextNav is seeking access to the lower 900 MHz band used by RAIN RFID for terrestrial position, navigation and timing (TPNT) as well as consumer 5G access. The FCC accepted comments on the request in the summer and has not yet made its ruling on the petition.
Srinivasan commented that on a personal level “I look back at the petition to the FCC to reconfigure the lower 900 MHz Band as something that brought the RAIN RFID [community] together,” with a mission to demonstrate and reinforce the strengths and capabilities as well as the value of RFID technology.
“It gave me great pride in how an industry can mobilize and collaborate, though organizations like RAIN RFID Alliance, for the greater good,” she said. Nearly 1,900 responders have filed their opinions including those in the LoRaWan, Z-Wave and other wireless technologies that use the “Part 15” device band.
Looking forward Srinivasan said, “I’m confident that we will be a lot more embedded solutions in 2025, further solidifying our view of RFID as a ‘hidden hero’ of all connected products.”
Temperature Monitoring and Ruggedization
With the increasing adoption of RAIN RFID in logistics, cold chain, and ruggedized tag applications, more specialty tags are being deployed. Use of the technology by logistics companies such as UPS, FedEx, and DHL underscores the sector’s momentum, said Identiv’s CEOKirsten Newquist. “Our focus has been on developing specialty tags tailored to meet specific market needs,” said Newquist and for that reason the company is seeing continued demand in products for temperature monitoring and sensing applications for the cold chain. Its Tag on Metal (TOM) solutions are optimized for industrial applications on metal surfaces.
Newquist added that “We achieved a key win with a defense-related aviation customer exploring sensing applications for highly specialized use cases. These accomplishments highlight Identiv’s ability to deliver cutting-edge, application-specific solutions in evolving market segments.”
The September RAIN Alliance meeting in Italy helped define how RFID solutions can support compliance with the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) in the U.S. and other regulatory requirements worldwide, Newquist pointed out.
“As we look to 2025, we expect to see increased adoption of RFID and BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy]-based solutions, with new applications and use cases being designed and piloted,” Newquist said. This adoption expansion is being driven by macrotrends like digitization and expansion of IoT, sustainability and the circular economy, regulatory compliance and safety, and enhanced security and anti-counterfeiting requirements. Hybrid solutions are on the rise as well.
“We anticipate seeing more secure and closed loop applications as well as industry standardization of Type 2, 4 and 5 tags across all suppliers, which we think will support greater adoption of RFID and NFC-based solutions,” added Newquist.
Loss Detection and Authentication
In 2024, Zebra witnessed growing interest in RFID-enabled loss detection, by identifying goods leaving a store without being purchased. Each interaction with an RFID reader in this environment creates an automated record to answer: “what product,” “where,” “when” and “how much” associated with retail shrink events, said Zebra’s Dunn. RFID allows retailers to do this more proactively and strategically as part of their Loss Prevention programs, he pointed out.
In the meantime, the food supply chain is riddled with challenges: labor shortages and rising wages, recalls and food safety, food waste, and high transportation costs. “RFID has become a technology of choice for inventory visibility, operational efficiency, product traceability, expiration management, and food safety,” Dunn said, noting grocers and quick serve restaurants are primarily responsible for driving RFID adoption in food.
While many global trends have the ability to shape or impact the industry, “the primary driving force behind the growth of RFID continues to be the need for visibility and digital representation into things and processes,” said Dunn.
Rise In Fixed Reader Deployments
Another 2024 trend is a change in infrastructure demands. For the first time in Zebra’s history, fixed RFID solutions are growing faster than mobile RFID solutions, said Dunn. “As organizations become more comfortable in consuming and utilizing RFID data, the desire to leverage RFID tagged items for more and more use cases has become a common strategy,” he speculated.
“Leveraging RFID fixed readers to capture data at key business control points where it would otherwise be too difficult or unaffordable has been a key theme in 2024,” according to Dunn
And while other technologies continue to evolve in the IoT space, RFID deployments have traditionally focused on the “RF” part of the technology—long range, non-line-of-sight reading, at low cost.
Growth brings greater demand for serialization as well to ensure a well-managed system for unique identifiers. With billions of unique tags in use, that serialization becomes more important, food traceability, medical supplies usage, and even retail returns fraud management, Dunn said.
“The industry has often talked about ‘authentication’ for various items as a real potential benefit of RFID and those solutions are beginning to come to market in a bigger way,” he said.
Sustainability and Privacy
Two key trends that have surfaced this year for semiconductor company NXP were sustainability and assuring privacy for consumers and authentication of products. First, sustainability has been front and center of most conversations this year and will continue to be so in the coming years, said NXP’s James Goodland, director, RAIN RFID Solutions.
This includes everything from understanding the impact of DPP to the increase in the use of RAIN RFID in reusable assets and e-commerce providers. From a RAIN RFID industry point of view, there is a move to be as environmentally friendly as possible, he pointed out. There has been a resulting trend to reduce tag sizes to consume less raw materials.
That is followed by the increased discussion around privacy and authentication. These very important concepts are becoming more important as the industry sees the manufacturing of items, products and components move towards being born digital, where RAIN RFID functionality is designed in and the capability is embedded as part of these items manufacturing, said Goodland.
“This allows for better authentication, which can help prevent the spread of counterfeit goods. This is particularly important in industries such as healthcare, where product authenticity is critical to patient safety,” he said.
Goodland noted that the DPP has served as a catalyst for the industry to focus on expanding the use of RAIN technology into many products and industries where it is not currently widely adopted. “Topics such as this can only be addressed as an industry and are forming a large part of the conversation within both NXP partner communities and the RAIN Alliance as a whole,” he said.
The idea of consumer engagement is topic being accelerated by the conversation around DPP as well. “Yet, when it comes to implementation of DPP, there won’t be one size fits all type solution. Data carriers for DPP will undoubtedly vary, with NFC having a very big role to play, as well as QR codes.”
Pharmaceuticals
Growth areas are moving into more sectors—in addition to food that includes pharmaceutical pilot projects ongoing, as well as some bigger roll-outs, said Goodland. “We’re happy to see that the activity and momentum is growing in what were once niche industries.”
He predicts that sustainability and consumer engagement topics will continue to drive adoptions into 2025. “These two things will dominate the direction of the industry for the next year and beyond,” offered Goodland. “This will require the industry to figure out the technologies around embedding tags and the necessary systems and coding structures required for end user interaction.”
Next focus may include enabling interoperability between people and entities interacting with RAIN tags. That could come by way of RAIN RFID functionality built into handsets. Qualcomm is already working on such technology integrations.
“Some of these technologies are already in place, while others need industry cooperation to achieve. NXP is right there helping and leading the industry in these key areas critical for the future,” Goodland added.