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News Article

European retailers back new RFID standards

Four major European retailers - Ahold, Carrefour, Metro Group and Tesco – have agreed to use a standard drawn up by the European Adoption Programme (EAP) for RFID tags for consumer goods.
Four major European retailers - Ahold, Carrefour, Metro Group and Tesco – have agreed to use a standard drawn up by the European Adoption Programme (EAP) for RFID tags for consumer goods.

EAP – an alliance of companies involved in the development of RFID - has drawn up a series of standards with the aim of kick-starting the use of radio tags by retailers.

The group is worried that in the absence of a universally accepted standard, proprietary systems will inhibit growth in the RFID market – potentially worth hundreds of millions of euros a year.

EAP co-chair Dr Gerd Wolfram said: "EAP is working with retailers to ensure that they all work together and stamp out the possibility of proprietary systems springing up.

"Non-standard systems won't be able to talk to each other and duplication would be required. This would add massive costs to the supply chain, especially for the manufacturers."

The EAP claims that widespread adoption of its RFID standards would promote competition because retailers would be able to buy the tags from a large number of suppliers.

Suppliers would also be able to keep costs down because they would not have to develop different tags for different retailers.

Tesco group technology director John Clarke urged other retailers to adopt the EAP standards.

"Radio Barcodes could bring huge benefits to consumers such as better availability and faster movement of products, which will eventually reduce costs and bring lower prices.

"These benefits will only come about if retailers and manufacturers develop systems which talk to each other. Traditional bar codes posed similar challenges when they were introduced many years ago and now we take them for granted proving that co-operation among retailers gets results for consumers."
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