Cpma.ca -Non-profit organization marketing fruit & vegetables in Canada
Title
CPMA - Home
Description
It is difficult to imagine a technology topic which has generated more discussion recently in the produce sector than the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and the EPC (Electronic Product Code). Ask any retailer currently involved in testing and implementation and they will all say “It’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when.”
Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify individual items. It is helpful to think of the RFID as the physical carrier of the data, which is in the form of the EPC. There are several methods of identifying objects using RFID, but the most common is to store a serial number that identifies a product, and perhaps other information (the EPC), on a microchip that is attached to an antenna (the chip and the antenna together are called an RFID transponder or an RFID tag). The antenna enables the chip to transmit the identification information to a reader. The reader converts the radio waves returned from the RFID tag into a form that can then be passed on to computers that can make use of it. Source: RFID Journal.
The Electronic Product Code (EPC) is a numbering scheme that uniquely identifies all objects and is built as part of a network, EPC Global. In essence each EPC on an item is the key to information about that item which exists on the EPC Global network. In each country a division of EPC Global will manage the EPC system and the data carried through the EPC/RFID. Like bar codes, the EPC (SGTIN) contains numbers that identify the company and the item but in addition includes a serial number which uniquely identifies that particular item. (Please note that there are various EPC tag coding standards depending on what the EPC is used for. For item identification, the EPC standard is the SGTIN.)
