The combination of QR code and RFID technology will have better traceability
Coöperatie Hoogstraten, a Belgian supplier of fresh fruits and vegetables, has partnered with RFID technology supplier Aucxis to provide visibility and track the movement of its strawberries throughout the supply chain. This system makes it possible to ensure that empty cardboard trays and baskets are sent to the grower to pack the fruit quickly and efficiently. Then, by sending the products to websites, stores, and consumers, track these fruits.
The solution uses a QR code to track each cardboard box of fruit and connects to a passive RFID tag tray to automatically obtain data about the product when it enters the store.
Coöperatie Hoogstraten sells various products to retailers in Europe and the United Kingdom. The company sells strawberries from 223 growers in Belgium and the Netherlands. It handles 56 million barrels and 7 million pallets every year.
According to Jeroen Swolfs, junior operations manager of Coöperatie Hoogstraten, strawberries were previously printed with color codes on the sides of plastic buckets. In order to deliver fresh products in time, the company will deliver boxes of empty strawberry baskets to growers when the strawberries are harvested.
Each tray contains 1,200 trays of fruit, and each tray contains 30,000 buckets. Before the application of RFID and QR code systems, trays of strawberries from different growers were placed on the trays until the strawberries were full, which could be identified by the strawberry code. However, some customers do not want a complete pallet, which means that a pallet must be separated, making the supply chain more complicated.
"You can never tell exactly which grower has given how many pallets to which customer," said Swiss. "This is a nightmare for accurate tracking. In the recall, many unnecessary products had to be withdrawn from the market, simply because there was no specific information about each barrel." When the company switched from plastic barrels to cardboard When barrels, he saw an opportunity to improve the identity tracking of these containers.
The company chose a hybrid system that uses a QR code to identify each plant and associate it with a specific grower, and uses RFID tags to monitor cartons stacked and transported on pallets. To achieve better traceability, it partnered with cardboard and machinery supplier Smurfit Kappa, who built a system that enables QR code data to be automatically printed on each barrel.
