Cold Chain RFID refers to the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) device, software and services that is used in tracking and monitoring perishable products during the cold chain storage and logistic. The growth of the global cold chain radio frequency identification (RFID) market is driven by the government mandates for pharmaceutical delivery traceability, along with increasing focus on food safety in the developed countries of North America and Europe. However, the high installation and maintenance cost, and complicated technology of RFID is hindering the growth of the cold chain RFID market in the developing countries. RFID is used for complete tracking of goods and its temperature during the entire supply chain process. The lack of global standards, along with troubleshooting issues is hindering its wide scale adoption in cold chain.
Over the past few years, the emphasis on effective monitoring of temperature sensitive products in cold chain has increased significantly, owing to the growth of organized food & beverage retail in developing countries. The increasing consumption of chilled and frozen goods in developing countries is expected to lay new market opportunities for the cold chain RFID providers during the forecast period. The increased outsourcing of temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals production from developing countries has also boosted the growth of the cold chain RFID market in developing countries.
The technical advancement in RFID, such as fusion of sensors, has extended its application in cold chain logistics services. The advanced RFID with sensors can trace temperature of the product though out its storage and logistic period. RFID used in cold chain includes sensors, RFID tag and RFID readers. The software and services segment is expected to be the fastest growing segment of the global cold chain RFID market during the forecast period.
Asia-Pacific accounted for the largest cold chain capacity (in terms of volume) in 2015. Despite this, the cold chain RFID market in the region is fairly low as compared to North America and Europe. Large parts of cold chain RFID deployment in developing countries are in empirical phase. Most of the cold chain service providers in these developing countries deploy RFID to fulfill retailers’ requests and achieve food safety regulations. However with low profit margin, the cold chain vendors in developing countries are finding hard to generate return on investment and hence the adoption of cold chain RFID was below its potential during 2012-2015.
Some of the major companies operating in the global cold chain RFID market include Checkpoint Systems Inc., Alien Technology, Nedap N.V., Impinj Inc., Invengo Technology BV, RFID4U (eSmart Source, Inc.), Avery Dennison Corporation, Sato Holdings Corporation and GAO RFID Inc.
