The American chain Chipotle Mexican Grill operating in the USA, UK, Canada, Germany and France is trialling RFID within its logistics supply chain, tracking food deliveries to improve traceability and inventory tracking. In a press release on the 31st March 2022, the company announced that it was working with Auburn University RFID Lab to start trials that will put UHF RFID labels onto trays/boxes of food items which are controlled with HACCP and have a short shelf life such as meat, dairy and Avocados. This comes after two years of innovation which is now being rolled out to a select number of venues for further ‘real world’ trials.
The food deliveries will be traced from food suppliers, through their distribution centres and into their restaurants with full tracking of their journey. This will allow Chipotle to improve food safety and quality and automate some of the HACCP documentation requirements.
“RFID labels transform inventory management into an automatic, digital function that optimizes restaurant operations and gives our Restaurant Support Centers access to inventory data in real-time”
Scott Boatwright, Chief Restaurant Officer.
Chipotle have suffered some issues with hygiene and were fined $25m (FT.com) which was later deferred after agreements with the US Justice department. Clearly Chipotle have stout to rectify some of those issues through RFID technology to provide traceability and transparency in their food supply chain and storage in their kitchens.
The implementation of RFID technology is not only within Chipotle themselves, but also within participating suppliers who have also invested in this technology, teaming up with RFID partners including RFID software provider Mojix, materials science and RFID innovator Avery Dennison, and RFID reader and encoder solutions provider Zebra Technologies.
It does seem that Chipotle are using RFID in a very narrow area of their business and missing many of the advantages of RFID technology can bring. The benefits that can be found through RFID in stock control, HACCP inspections, reducing food waste, improving cleaning and hygiene, content delivery to customers, customer loyalty schemes and gathering data are seemingly being missed.
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