Tesco flirts with RFID for products and vehicles

Supermarket giant Tesco is looking into the possibility of adding RFID tracking tags to its shop-floor products and lorries.

John Clarke, group technology director at Tesco, said this week that the chain is looking into tagging lorries and cases, as well as introducing item-level tagging. "We have no firm plans," he said. "But yes, I am looking at those... they all have benefit."

"My challenge is to work out when to do which and how," he told the GS1 UK EPCglobal conference.

Clarke also revealed that Tesco sees great potential in tracking its reusable assets, such as trays, pallets and cages, but the company will need a more long-term solution. "We don't plan to tag them each time they go through the supply chain - they last us seven years," he said.

Tesco's ongoing experiments with the tracking chips have not been without pain.

"In some of our stores, [it] interferes with the phone system... it's not the end of the world," Clarke said. Among the other problems the retailer uncovered were chips reacting to low temperatures in airplane cargo-holds during transit ("It wasn't til we got 5,000 tags that we discovered that it was a really cold airplane"), and a dense reader environment causing problems around protocols.

"Real life cannot be re-enacted or recreated in a lab - we're learning by doing this," Clarke added. "It's a leap of faith."

He also told delegates expecting to install the barcode replacement without any hassle that they will be disappointed: "If you think putting this into your business can be done without disruption, you're in the wrong business," he added.