NRF 2025: Phenix Label Doubles Output of Liquid Product Tracking Tags

Published: January 13, 2025
  • The company is displaying its specialized RFID labels at NRF this week in New York.
  • The with twice the production, the company is poised to help more brands and food companies adopt RFID tracking for their liquid products.

Phenix Label announced its doubled production capacity this week, in conjunction with the 2025 NRF Retail Show. The expanded capacity is aimed at helping food and consumer brand product companies to help meet the growing demand for RFID enabled packaging for liquid-based products.

The company says its capacity is in the 100s of millions, and it is still investing the infrastructure to stay ahead of the retail vendors’ needs.

“By doubling production capacity of these RFID-enabled packaging labels, clients can significantly ramp up their production volume,” said Mark Volz, vice president of sales and marketing, Phenix Label.

Meeting RFID Demand

Companies have been striving to meet retailer mandates with RFID traceability of products that are liquid. Thus far products most commonly being tracked with Phenix’ RFID specialized labels include pesticides, bleaches, household cleaning and automotive products.

Additionally, food traceability helps ensure freshness of food as it travels to store shelves.

Phenix Label makes labels and flexible packaging for consumer goods. The family-owned company has been producing labels, tags and shrink sleeve products for 125 years. Since early 2024 it has been providing solutions for companies that have liquid filled consumer packaged goods as well as liquid food items. However, liquids can absorb RF transmissions, making it more challenging to read the tag IDs of a label applied to a bottle of liquid with a handheld or fixed reader.

“Traditionally, the high-conductivity properties of liquid hampered the performance of RFID tags, resulting in poor or no data transmission when scanning liquid-filled packaging,” said Volz, noting the challenge of reading tags on store shelves, or when goods are packed together in cartons, or on pallets.

Label Solution

Phenix’ solution is a tear-away, UHF RAIN RFID label that is positioned above the fill level of bottled products. It is designed with a form factor that can be applied to a bottle in that limited free space above the liquid level. By being placed above the liquid it ensures a reliable tag read whether on a shelf, or even as goods move through a dock door.

“Plus, the extended tab provides brand manufacturers with additional packaging space for persuasive marketing, increasing product visibility on the retail shelf,” said Volz.

The tear away feature makes it possible to remove the label from the packaging before it is recycled. That ensures a more sustainable solution since the silicon and metal-based antenna is not recyclable, while the rest of the product container can be recycled.

Food Issues

Phenix is striving to meet needs related to water-based food items, said Volz. This packaging design enables RFID tagging of water-based food items that have not been previously tracked using RFID technology.

“We are also working on NFC labels for marketing spirits and a variety of applications for interactive customer experience and tracking,” he said. NFC tags can be read by mobile phones.

According to Grand View Research, the global food traceability market size is growing. Traceability is provided via barcodes as well as RFID and other IoT technologies. The barcode segment is expected to grow at a rate of 9.2 percent yearly, while RFID is anticipated to grow at 9.8 percent each year.

The food industry in fact is striving to meet the rising expectations for consumer satisfaction, including freshness of product, sustainable production and supply chains, and a digital trail of a product’s life prior to sale.

The value proposition for food inventory management and traceability is heightened by the FDA’s Food Traceability rule: FSMA Section 204. The FSMA rule identifies food for which additional traceability records are required to enable fast and efficient product recalls.  Those records can be collected automatically with RFID, although barcode scanning is another option.

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