Ahead of RAIN in Action in Madrid, we sat down with some of our sponsors to hear how they see RAIN RFID evolving — from where adoption is accelerating today to what item-level data must become by 2030. In this Q&A, they share their perspective on the technology’s role in the wider digital ecosystem, the opportunities opening up as RAIN data feeds AI and sustainability efforts, and why they’re helping shape the conversation in Madrid.
Authors: Gary Moskovciak, Chief Commercial Officer, SML Group Limited and Walt Harper, Global Senior Manager – RFID and Factory Solution Services, SML Group Limited
1. Tell us about SML and how it uses RAIN technology.
As a global Digital ID leader, founded in 1985 and headquartered in Hong Kong, delivering end-to-end labeling and RFID solutions across 28 countries with 24 production sites, 17 sales offices, and more than 4,100 employees serving over 600 retail brand owners and 13,000+ active OEMs. We describe ourselves as “a worldwide Digital ID leader… helping brands achieve improved profitability, growth and sustainability through end-to-end labelling and RFID solutions in the new era of retailing,” Providing billions of tags year over year, we have quickly advanced as a market leader for RFID enablement.
Practically, we provide RAIN (UHF RFID) technology at every stage of the item journey. In the factory, our In-Plant Printing (IPP / FlexiPrint) and Factory Care Solutions (FCS / FlexiQC) platforms encode, validate, and print RAIN tags on demand across hundreds of IPP sites, with each site having multiple installed printers, and vast portfolio of active deployments in 20+ countries all enabling brand data into a physical, item-level digital identity at source. That RAIN-carried identity then flows into our proprietary E-Platform data management system that keeps variable data, serialization, and orders synchronized globally. In short, RAIN RFID is the connective tissue that lets SML physically create the identity of every product where it begins — at the factory and carrying trusted item-level data all the way through the supply chain, into stores, and out to the consumer.
2. What use cases are seeing particularly strong growth in the adoption of RAIN technology?
At SML we see three vectors accelerating right now. The first is retail expansion: item-level tagging is spreading rapidly across home goods, footwear, electronics, and imminently health & beauty, cosmetics, and OTC pharmaceutical categories under retailer mandates such as Walmart’s and other EU retailers . The next tagging wave currently being adopted is food-related RFID trials with many of these same retailers. The second is healthcare and pharmaceuticals, where RAIN RFID has matured into a scalable technology for real-time inventory, expiration verification, anti-counterfeiting, and end-to-end pharma traceability driving strong growth in hospitals, pharmacies, and manufacturer supply chains.
The third and increasingly prominent vector is upstream adoption across logistics, transportation, and manufacturing. Cold-chain and cross-border e-commerce visibility are surging, and manufacturers are moving from downstream tagging to source-level encoding, digital-twin creation, and multi-tier supplier visibility. This is precisely where SML’s Factory Care Solutions and In-Plant Printing capabilities are seeing the fastest growth in our own portfolio.
3. Where does RAIN technology sit within the wider digital ecosystem?
RAIN sits at the very foundation of the modern digital ecosystem: it is the item-level data layer that connects the physical world of products to the digital systems that increasingly run our businesses. The RAIN Alliance itself defines its mission as “enabling organizations to improve traceability, effectiveness, and sustainability by simplifying, standardizing, and accelerating the adoption of RAIN technology,” and describes RAIN as the technology used “to connect trillions of everyday items across their entire lifecycle, simply and inexpensively.” Built on globally adopted standards from ISO, GS1, and the RAIN Alliance, RAIN provides a universal, interoperable data carrier — so the same tag encoded in a Vietnamese factory can be read by fixed readers in an EU distribution center, a handheld in a store, or a consumer smartphone downstream.
From that foundation, RAIN feeds upward into every layer of the digital stack — edge and IoT sensors, cloud data platforms, enterprise systems (ERP, WMS, PLM, POS), and increasingly into AI, computer vision, and digital-twin environments. At SML, this is exactly how Clarity®, our E-Platform, and our Solution Innovation Centers are architected: API-based integration with more than 100 service-based APIs, event-driven UIs, item-level data schemas, and edge-cloud hybrid deployments that turn tag reads into decisions in real time.
4. What do you think the future holds for RAIN technology, and how will this support SML’s future ambitions?
The future of RAIN is one of massive scale, deeper embedding, and richer intelligence. VDC Research and the RAIN Alliance expect annual tag-chip shipments to surpass 115 billion by 2028–2029, with the industry pushing toward “trillions of things being tagged” over time, driven by embedded tags, sustainability mandates, and cross-industry diversification. We are also seeing structural technology shifts SML is preparing for now: miniaturized and higher-performance inlays that unlock high-volume/low-margin categories; embedded and integrated tags that live with a product across its full lifecycle; sensor fusion of UHF with HF, BLE, and computer vision; and edge-cloud architectures that make real-time analytics and automation routine.
For SML, this future maps directly onto five ambitions we are actively investing in today. (1) Item-level digital identity — every product carrying a unique, standards-based EPC from the factory floor onward, delivered through our tags, encoding and product identifiers. (2) Digital Product Passports, our DPP solution is engineered for purposeful data collection, authority-ready integration, and flexible SKU-level to item-level scaling as ESPR delegated acts finalize between late 2026 and mid-2028.(3) AI-ready data which is clean, serialized, verified item data flowing through our E-Platform for downstream AI use.(4) Factory Care Solutions (FCS) on of our fastest-growing segments enabling factory encoding and RFID enabled efficiencies to be realized.
5. As RAIN-collected data increasingly feeds into AI and downstream applications, what new opportunities does that open up and how does sustainability factor into scaling responsibly?
RAIN-collected data is quickly becoming the most trusted physical-world signal feeding AI and downstream applications. When billions of items generate real-time, item-level events, AI can turn that stream into demand forecasts, dynamic replenishment, markdown avoidance, loss-prevention analytics, product authentication, and post-purchase engagement. These kinds of use cases the RAIN in Action 2026 conference itself frames as “intelligent systems capable of real-time decision-making and operational automation… new post-purchase experiences, product authentication, circular economy initiatives, and brand-to-consumer engagement.” At SML we have already begun operationalizing this pattern through our internal AI intelligence layer that synthesizes live market intelligence, regulatory frameworks, and technical standards to guide item-level RFID, DPP, and E-Platform deployments across our 600+ global brands.
Sustainability is the precondition for scaling this responsibly. We are shipping a growing portfolio of eco-designed products including 100%-plastic-free paper-based RFID inlays that separate cleanly for recycling and pairing them with SML’s SBTi-validated 2050 net-zero targets. Just as importantly, our participation in the RAIN Alliance Manufacturing Quality Working Group — where SML is a signed member — is helping the industry publish quality standards that keep tag reliability high even as volumes head toward 100+ billion by 2028, so that AI-driven decisions rest on trustworthy physical data. That combination of RAIN + AI feeding sustainable business models, backed by responsibly manufactured tags is how we intend to scale.
6. During RAIN In Action, Gary Moskovciak will speak on ‘what item data must become by 2030’ — why is this topic so important at this moment in time?
The topic is important right now because three forces are converging at once, and all of them run through item-level data.
First, regulation has set a hard clock. The EU’s Digital Product Passport under ESPR is turning persistent, item-level identity from a competitive nice-to-have into a compliance requirement for products sold into Europe this decade. That’s what makes 2030 a real deadline rather than a rhetorical one. The timeline is being written into law, not aspiration.
Second, AI is raising the stakes on data quality. Supply chains are moving toward systems that decide and act without a human in the loop, and an autonomous system is only as trustworthy as the item data beneath it. The binding constraint on that future won’t be algorithms, it’ll be whether the identity of each physical item can be trusted without someone checking it.
Third, circularity and resale are extending how long identity must survive. A product made today may be resold and recycled years from now. Long after the systems that created it have changed, it still needs a working, trustworthy identity as it survives.
What ties those together, and why the timing is urgent, is that all of it is decided at the point of manufacture. Every property item data must be acquired by 2030; persistent, trusted, interoperable, intelligent. Designed in at the source or is expensive to near impossible to add later. You can clean a database; you can’t retrofit trust into a physical item once it’s already in the world. So, the decisions being made on factory floors right now determine whether the industry can meet a 2030 that’s already arriving.
And from a commercial standpoint, that’s the reason this can’t sit in an R&D backlog. The brands and manufacturers who treat source-level identity as a strategic decision today will be compliant, AI-ready, and circular ready by 2030. The ones who treat it as a downstream data-cleanup problem will be paying to retrofit billions of items resulting in the most expensive mistake in the category.
The 2030 horizon is important right now because the definition of “item data” is being rewritten simultaneously by regulators, retailers, and AI. On the regulatory side, the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and its Digital Product Passport regime move from framework to enforcement between 2027 and 2030: the Battery Passport becomes mandatory on 18 February 2027, textile/apparel delegated acts are expected between late 2026 and Q2 2027 with enforcement now confirmed for mid-2028, and by end of 2030 DPP is expected to be mandatory for all major EU product groups such as textiles, electronics, furniture, batteries, industrial goods. In parallel, industry consensus is shifting from generic sustainability claims to enforceable, item-level, batch-level, and verified datawith various agreements in the works that will standardizing the technology stack. In short, the world is moving from SKU-level to item-level to verified, lifecycle-persistent data — and there are less than four years to complete the transformation.
That is why this talk sits exactly where RAIN in Action participants focus should be for data. By 2030, item data must be serialized, verifiable, machine-readable, interoperable, AI-ready, and persistent across the product lifecycle.Not just a barcode at point-of-sale. That requires standards alignment (GS1 EPC Tag Data, ISO, and RAIN Alliance protocols), source-tagging with EPC integrity so there are no orphan or duplicate serials, and integration with DPP platforms and AI systems downstream.If we get this right by 2030, item data becomes the trusted backbone of circular commerce, connected consumers, and intelligent supply chains; if we do not, non-compliant products will be intercepted at customs and brands will be locked out of the world’s largest sustainability-driven markets. That is what makes this the defining industry conversation of 2026.
7. Why is SML a RAIN Alliance member?
SML is a RAIN Alliance member and advocate — at the Collaborator Membership tier — because the future of item-level RFID depends on open standards, quality assurance, and industry-wide advocacy that no single company can deliver alone. The RAIN Alliance’s mission of “enabling organizations to improve traceability, effectiveness, and sustainability by simplifying, standardizing and accelerating the adoption of RAIN technology through global collaboration and innovation” mirrors our own commitments as a Digital ID leader, and its four pillars;Accelerates Adoption, Amplifies Awareness, Enables Seamless Deployment, Advances Sustainability,line up directly with SML’s growth, ESG, and product strategy. Membership gives SML access to a global network of 150+ market-leading users and technology providers, insight into industry trends, and a seat at the table where technical work items and policy papers that shape the future of RAIN are decided.
Concretely, SML contributes where our expertise matters most. We are a signed member of the Manufacturing Quality Working Group, actively co-shaping the RAIN Manufacturing Quality Certification Guideline,an open, ISO-9001-aligned framework that will help the industry maintain reliability as tag volumes climb from toward more than 100 billion by 2028. We also engage with the Alliance’s DPP advocacy including the RAIN Alliance / GS1 joint statement affirming RAIN as the best-positioned data carrier for DPPs — which is essential for the EU regulatory work that will define our customers’ compliance obligations from 2027 onward. Being a RAIN Alliance member is how SML makes sure the standards, the quality bar, and the sustainability narrative for RAIN are set at the level our brand partners and their customers deserve.
8. This year’s RAIN in Action theme is ‘RAIN-enabled infrastructure to real-world impact: Powering smarter businesses, smarter lives.’ How would you describe this transition within the RAIN industry?
The industry has spent the last decade building the RAIN infrastructure from chips, tags, readers, encoding services, software, standards, and manufacturing quality to the point where more than 52 billion tag chips shipped in 2024 alone. RAIN systems now underpin retail, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, automotive, aviation, logistics, and manufacturing operations at global scale. This year’s RAIN in Action theme, “RAIN: From Infrastructure to Impact — Powering Smarter Businesses, Smarter Lives,” captures exactly the transition we are in: RAIN has moved from a technology primarily used for inventory visibility to “a must-have foundational layer of real-time data about physical items, enabling new levels of automation, intelligence, and transparency across global industries” — and the next wave will combine RAIN with AI analytics, IoT sensors, computer vision, cloud platforms, and consumer smartphones to create intelligent systems that make measurable business and human outcomes possible.
For SML, “real-world impact” is not an abstraction. It is retailers cutting out-of-stocks below 2% and reaching >98% inventory accuracy in stores; it is factories using FlexiQC to catch tag errors before shipment and avoid chargebacks; it is pharmacies verifying every medication in seconds to keep patients safe; it is brands turning DPPs into evidence-based trust with consumers and enabling repair, resale, and recycling of the products we all own. The transition from infrastructure to impact is really the transition from tagging to outcomes — smarter businesses because every item is a real-time data point, and smarter lives because those data points can be trusted to power more sustainable, more transparent, and more human-centered commerce. That is the story SML is proud to help write as a sponsor of RAIN in Action 2026 in Madrid.
9. What inspired SML to become a Platinum sponsor for this year’s event?
SML is proud to support the RAIN Alliance as a Platinum Sponsor because we share a common commitment to advancing the adoption and value of RAIN technology through collaboration, innovation, and open standards. As a long-standing member, we believe industry progress is achieved by bringing together technology providers, manufacturers, brands, and retailers to solve shared challenges and accelerate adoption. RAIN in Action provides an ideal platform to share how trusted product identity, created at the source, is enabling greater traceability, operational efficiency, Digital Product Passport readiness, and the next generation of connected products.