Food and farming to be largest RFID market, says report

RFID for Animals, Food and Farming will become the largest RFID market of all because it will benefit the food supply chain in a huge number of ways including livestock disease control and merchandising prepared food, according to a IDTechEx report.

The report also discusses some changes of course in the industry. For example, there are rising concerns in East Asia that the EPCglobal organization nd product specifications are too expensive for management of the food supply chain, resulting in the emergence of the locally managed Universal Product Code and specifications now being trialed by governments in the region.

One particularly important Asian country is China. There are more pigs in just the Sichuan province of China than in the whole of the USA, with 1.2 billion pigs being eaten in China every year. In mid 2006, in the first pilot stage, HF ear tags were fitted on 10,000 live pigs in Qionglai city.

China is also very keen to grow an indigenous RFID industry, something already well progressed by orders placed by the Chinese government exclusively to Chinese suppliers. Because of the $6 billion National Identification card scheme peaking in deliveries in 2007, China is now the world’s largest market for RFID by value.

IDTechEx also claims that the US$9.4 billion market in 2017 for RFID systems and tags will also be based on rapid paybacks from improved traceability, condition monitoring, crime reduction and error prevention.