Walmart & Avery Dennison: Making Inventory Management Easier

The United Nations has identified food waste as a US$1tn opportunity.

But opportunity only knocks when there is collaboration and innovation across the value chain.

This collaboration and innovation is epitomised by a partnership between Walmart and Avery Dennison, which is driving the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology in fresh categories that were previously not possible.

Walmart says: “Addressing food waste and ensuring freshness are more important than ever for consumers, producers and retailers.

“This first-to-market solution is set to transform inventory processes and enhance associate and customer experiences across fresh departments – particularly bakery, meat and deli.”

It adds: “This is innovation in action, bringing RFID technology – once limited by temperature and moisture limitations - to new categories like protein and deli.

“This is technology connecting the physical and digital to reduce waste, improve labour efficiency, enhance consumer experiences and advance sustainability.”

Bringing RFID to the meat department

Retail giant Walmart teamed with packaging and containers manufacturer Avery Dennison to create and test a first-of-its-kind sensor technology that brings RFID-enabled labels to the meat department.

It addresses an enduring challenge for the industry of using RFID technology in high-moisture, cold environments like meat cases.

Avery Dennison has brought the solution to Walmart, giving it the ability to track inventory faster and more accurately – making sure products stay stocked and ready when customers want them.

The solution works for meat, bakery and deli products, giving employees digital use-by dates at their fingertips – boosting their ability to rotate products more efficiently and make smarter markdown decisions, helping cut down on unsold food.

A landmark moment

Leaders at Walmart and Avery Dennison are excited about the efficiencies and improvements that the RFID solution will bring to Walmart’s 11,000-plus stores across the globe.

Christyn Keef, VP of Front End Transformation for Walmart US, says: “We believe technology should make things easier for our associates and our customers.

“By cutting down on manual work, we’re giving our associates more time to focus on what really matters – helping our customers.”

Julie Vargas, VP and GM of Avery Dennison Identification Solutions, says: “Supporting Walmart with first-to-market RFID innovation across multiple fresh food categories underscores our mutual commitment to people and the planet.

“By giving each item its own digital identity, associates instantly know the freshness of the foods they are handling, enabling better inventory management and resulting in less waste.”

Julie adds: “This is a landmark moment for the industry and chimes with our own personal milestone as Avery Dennison celebrates 90 years of helping to solve some of the world’s most complex challenges.”

Tying in with broader goals

The collaboration also fits with Walmart’s sustainability goals, including its aim to cut global operational food loss and waste intensity in half by 2030.

The company says: “By introducing automated item-level identification, Walmart and Avery Dennison are transforming how fresh food is managed – making operations smarter, faster and more sustainable.

For Avery Dennison, the RFID solution is part of a strategy to boost source-to-store transparency across the food retail industry.

It says: “Building on this important milestone for the grocery retail industry, Avery Dennison remains committed to enabling a more connected food supply chain through its Optic solutions portfolio, making visibility and transparency from source to store possible.”

Mike Colarossi, Head of Enterprise Sustainability. Avery Dennison, says: “The UN has identified food waste as a US$1tn opportunity.

“Unlocking that opportunity requires innovation and collaboration across the value chain.

Mike says he is excited about how Avery Dennison and Walmart will “take a bite out of the problem”.

What is RFID and how does it work?

Radio Frequency Identification is a way of wirelessly tagging objects via electromagnetic fields to track and store information.

Operating like a barcode, when the RFID tag is triggered by a nearby reader it sends out information through radio waves for the receiver to interpret.

Unlike a barcode, RFID-enabled items do not need to be in the line of sight of a scanner to be read, so the RFID tag can be embedded into a product and be scanned as long as it is within range.

RFID is not necessarily a well-known acronym, but the technology impacts almost everyone’s lives.

It is used in oyster cards, chips in passports and for preventing shoplifters as the RFID tags on groceries trigger the alarms if someone were to leave without paying.

Perhaps most significantly, it is the key to contactless payments, which have increased dramatically worldwide in the past decade.