Strawberries tracked through QR and RFID combination

Belgian fresh fruit and vegetable auctioneers  Coöperatie Hoogstraten has worked with RFID technology supplier Aucxis to provide visibility and to track the movements of its strawberries throughout the supply chain.

The company chose a hybrid system using QR codes to identify every punnet and link it to a specific grower, and RFID tags to monitor the pallet on which cardboard boxes are stacked and transported. The pallets are tagged with passive UHF RFID for automated data capture about the product as it travels to auction sites, stores and consumers.

The pallet tag is read by Impinj readers mounted on forklifts, while the QR codes are scanned using cameras in ‘vision tunnels’, provided by VistaLink, according to Lauran D’hanis, Aucxis’s account manager. Aucxis’s Hertz middleware captures all data and each RFID tag’s ID number. It then manages the data, linking the pallet’s unique ID with the punnet ID. This information is forwarded to Coöperatie Hoogstraten’s enterprise resource planning software.

The solution was launched in conjunction with the company’s transition from plastic to sustainable cardboard punnets, in cooperation with the cardboard and machinery supplier, Smurfit Kappa, which constructed a system to enable automated printing of QR code data on each punnet.

Source: AIPIA