Author: Juho Partanen, the VP of Market Transformation, Impinj

Twenty years of retail have solved the hardest proof-of-concept problem in our industry’s history. Now comes the hard part.

There is a version of the RAIN RFID story that ends with retail. The Walmart mandate. The apparel industry’s slow, grinding conversion to source tagging. The moment, arriving two decades after the first wave of excitement, when a new retailer beginning to deploy RAIN could simply assume that a meaningful majority of their incoming inventory will arrive already tagged. They could concentrate their investment on reader infrastructure and call it a day. That would be a remarkable achievement. It is also, emphatically, not the destination.

The destination is ubiquity, where smarter businesses and smarter lives are built on a world in which every item carries a unique digital identity that can be read, traced, and acted upon at every point in its journey. This applies to every pharmaceutical blister pack, surgical instrument, carton of fresh strawberries from Huelva, and bottle of Rioja moving through an intercontinental supply chain. That world is not yet here. Getting there requires the industry to be honest about what is holding it back, clear-eyed about what is pulling it forward, and disciplined about the difference between what individual players can do alone and what only the industry can do together.

What Retail Proved and What It Didn’t

The retail inheritance is real and should not be undersold. Twenty years of deployments in apparel retail sector produced a body of hard-won knowledge that the sectors now entering RAIN can draw on directly.

Every organization that attempted to solve the tagging question inside a distribution center or on the shop floor learned over time that tagging should happen as close to the point of manufacture as possible. Meaning, through proper deployment practices, commercial pressure, and sustained commitment, the supplier ecosystem must be brought along.

Retail has proven two key factors for success that, when adopted, helped organizations scale faster than those that didn’t. These principles travel to every sector that follows retail apparel in adopting RAIN.

First, the reliance on standards-based item identifiers is essential. Numerous organizations have tripped on this, as early on their journeys they accepted shortcuts and non-conformant identifiers, which often led to rework and downtime on operational systems. A long-term success factor is, therefore, to base project specifications on sector-specific standards, building interoperability between trading partners, safeguarding inventory accuracy, and enabling efficient sourcing over time.

Second, tagging must fit existing workflows. Every additional step asked of a worker on the factory floor or in the store creates compounding points of friction, threatening to down a tagging program before it gets off the ground. It is therefore wise to drive tagging to environments where process automation is present and where labelling takes place regardless. Most often, these environments are upstream.

Retail also offers a cautionary lesson on tagging specifications. End-users first deploying RAIN typically had specific read scenarios in mind — particular environments, form factors, product categories — but lacked the internal technical expertise to translate those requirements into tag specifications. The natural remedy was to contract that work to specialist programs, which produced an ever-expanding library of specification categories. Each category gave end-users a precise language for their requirements, which was genuinely useful. But the cumulative effect was a proliferation that introduced real drag: new tag products and innovations had to be certified against a growing matrix of specifications before they could enter a tagging program.

Emerging sectors can do better. The evolution and increasing sophistication of RAIN technology itself leads to more sensitive, physically smaller, and more reliably readable tags across a wider range of substrates and environments. That maturation means a narrower set of specification categories can cover more ground than was possible a decade ago. Simpler specifications, higher-volume production runs across a smaller variety of tag products, and faster certification cycles are not just administratively tidier — they are the structural conditions for industrialization at scale, as well as for keeping the overall cost of tagging on a trajectory that makes broad adoption viable.

What retail did not prove is that the journey is easy in sectors where none of this infrastructure yet exists. Neither has it proven out embedded tagging, which remains one of the most pressing open challenges the industry faces. Food, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare are not inheriting a pre-tagged supply chain. They are starting from ground level, needing to build sector-wide tagging programs and reader infrastructure simultaneously, with all of the supplier coordination and specification work that entails. The chicken-and-egg problem retail solved is fully alive in these sectors today. But moving these sectors along the adoption curve is crucial to the true ubiquity we are all striving for.

The Real Barriers to Ubiquity

Naming the barriers precisely matters because vague optimism is the enemy of strategic action. Though retail apparel has achieved a degree of maturity not yet seen in other key sectors, with the exception of the admirable work done in race timing applications and the tire industry, these barriers apply just as much to retail as to emerging sectors.

Barrier 1: Embedded tagging capacity is not yet at an industrial scale. In food, especially, tagging at the source requires manufacturing and packaging lines that can integrate tag application within existing production flows — not as an added step, but as part of the line. That infrastructure does not yet exist at scale across the supplier base.

“RFID is making real progress at the item level inside retail grocery today, but there is still much work to do upstream at source. Standardizing tagging across the full diversity of farmers, growers, and producers is no small task — and the challenge is not just what and where to tag, but how to reliably read tags in the densely packed, dynamic pallet configurations moving through the supply chain.”
JW Franz, Director of Innovation, TRG Solutions

The implication is that deployment programs must be designed for the supplier base that exists, not the one that would be convenient.

The Digital Product Passport (DPP) regulation makes this gap more urgent and more specific. DPP compliance requires tags that remain functional across the full product lifecycle, which immediately exposes one of the industry’s most pressing structural problems. Textile retail today is dominated by hangtags: disposable, easily removed at the point of sale, and therefore useless for any post-purchase application. The industry has built production capacity in the tens of billions for these disposable form factors. But DPP does not accommodate a tag that is gone by the time the consumer gets home. Embedded tagging is what compliance requires, and woven labels, in-seam tags, integrated inlays that survive washing, wearing, and resale are the products that meet those requirements.

The pioneers are already there: the tag supplier base has responded by launching an expanding variety of textile tags, many of which are laundry-rated. The challenge is that the industrial-scale production capacity for embedded tags does not yet exist in anything like the volumes that DPP compliance will demand: think tens of billions. Bridging that gap in manufacturing technology, in production investment, and in the supplier development programs that bring the broader industry along, is one of the defining practical challenges facing RAIN right now, and one the industry must collectively confront.

Barrier 2: Reader form factors remain too limited. RAIN-specific handheld devices and fixed read points dominate current deployments. New devices or RAIN integration is needed for fresh food counters, POS terminals, clinical settings, small-format retail, and, soon enough, consumer homes. More broadly available mobile implementations, embedded readers in existing infrastructure, and RAIN-enabled consumer devices are not luxuries. They are prerequisites for the next phase of growth. In collaboration with other Alliance members, Impinj contributes to the RAIN Alliance workgroup developing the specification for RAIN-enabled smartphones. Those specifications aim to secure delightful and safe consumer experiences regardless of the device brand the consumer uses.

Barrier 3: Regulatory threats require active engagement. The global harmonized frequency band that retail helped establish is a shared asset, but it is not self-maintaining. Spectrum policy, data localization requirements, and sector-specific mandates can develop in ways that fragment the ecosystem across geographies if the industry is not actively engaged in shaping them. Protecting favorable conditions for RAIN deployment across international supply chains is ongoing work, not a one-time achievement. This is why the RAIN industry collectively supports and empowers the RAIN Alliance to carry out the tedious regulatory advocacy work — work that Impinj has also been actively driving as a member in the RAIN Regulatory Advocacy Council (RRAC).

Barrier 4: New talent is needed to support growth in the new sectors. The pipeline of professionals who understand RAIN deeply enough to design, deploy, and manage complex implementations across food cold chains, pharmaceutical serialization programs, or hospital asset management systems is thin. Cultivating that talent is a long-cycle investment that the industry needs to make now, not when the shortage becomes acute. Again, I am pleased to highlight this barrier as one that the RAIN Alliance’s training programs, certifications, and academic partnerships have been actively addressing over the past five years. The tire industry is one success story, where the number of RAIN-certified professionals across all geographies is on the rise, following the training programs that the RAIN Alliance has produced with the continuous support of numerous Alliance member companies, including Voyantic.

The Accelerants Are Real Too

Against those barriers, the forces accelerating growth are genuinely powerful.

My observations at the largest industry events support the view that the AI moment looks poised to be the most significant external tailwind the industry has encountered. In the era of AI, a well-implemented RAIN program does not just create traceability; it creates a new-era corporate intelligence. It builds on a continuous, real-time stream of accurate item-level events that machine learning systems then analyze to predict spoilage, optimize replenishment, flag diversion in pharmaceutical supply chains, or surface patterns invisible to human operators.

“Autonomous RAIN readers generate near-real-time, item-level event streams without human intervention — delivering exactly the accurate data that enterprise AI models need to move from insight to action.”
Pareiya Gupta, Head of Retail – Product & GTM, GreyOrange

Executives who have been unmoved by traceability ROI arguments are paying close attention to AI. RAIN infrastructure generates accurate awareness of physical events, making AI actionable across the physical world — what we refer to as Physical Intelligence.

Pharma supply chains carry a less visible but equally important advantage. Drug traceability mandates have required the pharmaceutical industry to serialize products at the unit level, typically using barcodes as the data carrier. The IT infrastructure built to handle that serialized data, updated across the supply chain over the past five years, should already be capable of consuming the structured item-level data that RAIN RFID produces. For pharma stakeholders considering RAIN, that means the most expensive and disruptive part of the implementation — re-engineering enterprise systems to work with unit-level serialized events — is already done. RAIN enters not as a disruptor of existing systems, but as a higher-performance data layer on top of infrastructure that is already ready for it.

Perhaps the most structurally significant tailwind is one that arrives not from the market but from regulation. The European Union’s Digital Product Passport mandates a persistent, accessible digital identity for products across their entire lifecycle, from manufacture through use, resale, and end-of-life. China has just kick-started the development of its DPP regulation with the SAC/SWG41, and on the global level, the ISO JTC 5 first plenary is scheduled for September 2026.

RAIN RFID is a supported data carrier under the DPP framework, and even the preferred one for certain product categories, such as tires. The tire industry manifests that for industries already operating RAIN in their supply chains, RAIN is the de facto carrier of choice for DPP as well. The implications extend well beyond compliance. DPP drives ubiquity in two dimensions simultaneously: across industries, as every regulated product category must carry a digital passport, and across the full product lifecycle, as the tag must remain readable long after the supply chain transaction is complete. A product tagged for the supply chain becomes a product tagged for its entire life. That is a fundamentally different value proposition, and specifically the one that regulators, not just commercial logic, are now mandating.

Critically, the DPP also amplifies the imperative of RAIN support in consumer smart devices. For the digital passport to deliver value to end consumers, post-sale stakeholders, and circular economy participants, RAIN infrastructure must reach into homes, garages, repair shops, and recycling facilities. The technology’s journey to the doorstep — and beyond to the fridge, the wardrobe, the car, the sports field — is no longer merely aspirational. It is where the regulatory architecture points.

Deployment is also getting meaningfully easier. Standards bodies are moving faster, shortening the specification cycle in ways that benefit every sector entering RAIN. Also, the existing retail infrastructure is a platform that new verticals can build on rather than rebuild from scratch. While the world is not perfect yet, we should be proud of the supplier relationships, deployment frameworks, and integration playbooks created over the past 20 years.

The ground zero of adoption is also more flexible than it appears. In food, items manufactured or prepared in-store — the bakery counter, the fresh produce section, the deli — sidestep the supplier tagging problem entirely. The store is the manufacturer. That entry point is available now, generates immediate operational value, and builds the organizational muscle for broader deployment.

“Food isn’t one giant tagging problem — it’s a sequence of use cases, each earning the next. Start where you have full control, let the ROI make the argument, and the program funds its own expansion.”
Pedro Garza, Field Sales Account Manager, Impinj Inc.

What the Industry Must Do Together

Individual organizations can deploy RAIN. Only the industry can scale it to ubiquity.

That distinction has concrete implications.

  • Tagging specifications need to tell implementers where to go, not prescribe exactly how to get there. This drives economic adoption across enormously diverse supplier bases without forcing a single workflow.
  • Deployment practices designed for the label flows and processes that already exist, rather than for an ideal implementation that doesn’t, are what actually get adopted at scale.
  • Spectrum policy advocacy needs to be coordinated across geographies and sectors, because a fragmented frequency environment benefits no one.
  • The talent pipeline needs industry-wide investment, because no single company can build the training infrastructure that a global scaling effort requires.

The embedded tagging capacity gap is perhaps the most immediate collective challenge. The transition from disposable hangtags to durable embedded technologies cannot happen brand by brand or supplier by supplier. It requires coordinated investment in manufacturing capacity, shared development of industrial-scale embedded tagging solutions, and specification frameworks that give the entire supply base a clear and achievable path forward. That is a conversation the industry needs to have urgently and openly.

The retail sector spent twenty years building the ecosystem that new entrants now take for granted. The sectors entering RAIN today — food, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and those not yet on the radar — do not have 20 years. The regulatory clocks are running. The AI moment will not wait. The Digital Product Passport is not a future consideration; its implementation timeline is already set. The competitive advantage of moving now is real and time-limited.

Ubiquity is not an accident. It is the outcome of deliberate choices made by individual organizations about where to start and how to deploy, and by the industry as a whole about the standards, infrastructure, and talent that make scaling possible. Those choices are being made right now.

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About the author: Juho Partanen, the VP of Market Transformation, Impinj, Inc.

With 25 years of executive experience in the AIDC and RAIN RFID markets, Juho Partanen is a recognized industry leader and an advocate for industrial collaboration. Juho has contributed to global standards development across ISO, CEN/CENELEC and GS1 — including active involvement in the JTC 24 DPP workgroup through his prior role at Voyantic Ltd. A long-standing elected director of the RAIN Alliance Inc, he has also served three terms as its Chairman.