Contact Information: Editorial Contacts: Jim Donaldson Impinj, Inc. 206-834-1091 Lauren Kriegler Impinj, Inc. 206-812-9727
Impinj RFID Solution Ensures Food Freshness and Improves Consumer Safety
Impinj Speedway(R) Readers and Antennas Monitor Freshness of Meat Products in METRO Group's real,- Future Store
| Source: Impinj, Inc.
SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - June 5, 2008) - Leading UHF Gen 2 radio-frequency
identification (RFID) solutions provider Impinj, Inc. today announced a
groundbreaking implementation in food freshness and customer safety. Impinj
delivered a UHF RFID-based system to the world's third largest retailer,
METRO Group, in the most comprehensive in-store quality assurance
initiative to date. At the launch of their Future Store, METRO Group began
using RFID in the butchery to guarantee freshness, increase customer safety
and efficiently manage inventory.
METRO Group adds an Impinj Monza™ powered tag to each meat package
before placing it in a customer-facing Smart Freezer. Approximately 50
Impinj Speedway® readers and 200 Impinj near-field UHF antennas inside
the Smart Freezer continually monitor the "best before" date for each
package and alert store personnel to remove goods before they reach that
date. Additional read points at both point-of-sale terminals and exit gates
make sure that stock levels are accurately monitored at all times. As a key
element in METRO Group's goal of ensuring that customers purchase only
fresh meat products, Impinj's technology provides real-time, automated
inventory, eliminating a tedious and error-prone daily manual inventory.
Seeking a safe, effective and financially sound solution, METRO Group
selected long-term partner Impinj to pioneer the meat-tagging solution.
"Impinj's position as a leader in the RFID business and their experience
with item-level tagging made them the natural choice for our
implementation. We have worked with them in the past and have been
satisfied with the results each time," said Dr. Gerd Wolfram, managing
director of METRO Group Information Technology. "We use RFID in our real,-
Future Store in Toenisvorst in order to ensure the quality assurance and
inventory of fresh self-service meat products. We believe it is our
responsibility to provide customers with the highest level of safety
possible, and working with Impinj RFID technology gives us maximum levels
of performance with minimal integration issues."
The food-safety market is an ideal fit for Impinj's near- and far-field UHF
RFID technology, and highlights Impinj's proven ability to deliver UHF Gen
2 RFID solutions for compelling industry problems. With successful
deployments in the in-store butchery at METRO Group's real,- Future Store,
Impinj has positioned itself as the leading innovator in UHF RFID solutions
for food-safety applications.
About Impinj, Inc.
Impinj, Inc. is a semiconductor and RFID company whose patented
Self-Adaptive Silicon® technology enables two synergistic business lines:
high-performance RFID solutions and semiconductor intellectual property
(IP). Impinj is the leading technical innovator in developing UHF RFID
solutions for both item-level and supply-chain tagging worldwide. Impinj
draws on its technical expertise and industry partnerships to deliver the
GrandPrix™ RFID solution comprising high-performance tags, readers,
software, antennas and systems integration. Impinj also licenses innovative
IP products to leading semiconductor companies worldwide, allowing them to
seamlessly integrate crucial nonvolatile memory (NVM) alongside analog and
digital functionality on a single chip. Impinj's IP products include the
popular AEON® family of embeddable cores, which provide rewriteable NVM
technology in logic CMOS manufacturing. For more information, visit
www.impinj.com.
Impinj, Speedway, Self-Adaptive Silicon, GrandPrix, Monza, and AEON are
either registered trademarks or trademarks of Impinj, Inc.
About METRO Group
METRO Group is one of the world's most important international retailing
companies. In 2007, it generated around 64 billion euros in turnover. The
group maintains operations in 31 countries at more than 2,200 locations and
employs around 280,000 people. The strength of METRO Group is based on its
sales brands, which operate independently within their respective markets:
Metro/Makro Cash & Carry, the worldwide market leaders in self-service
wholesale; real,- hypermarkets; Media Markt and Saturn, the European market
leaders in consumer electronics; as well as Galeria Kaufhof department
stores.
More information is available at www.metrogroup.de and
www.future-store.org.