RFID FC product launch

Traceability solution from SUKU, Avery Dennison, and EM Microelectronic enables healthcare and pharmaceutical brands to better manage supply chains and customer experience

GLENDALE, Calif. – March 24, 2021, SUKU, a blockchain-based supply chain traceability solution, global materials science company Avery Dennison Corporation (NYSE: AVY), and EM Microelectronic, the ultra-low-power semiconductor company of the Swatch Group (VTX: UHR), today announced the release of a shared, end-to-end supply chain transparency solution for everyday healthcare and pharmaceutical products. 

Avery Dennison Smartrac's RAINFC Belt DF tags based on EM Microelectronic’s innovative em|echo-V IC allows for the easy tracing of products through application of long-range, dual-frequency transponders for product identification and management. This data can then be logged in SUKU's blockchain-powered application and tag management platform, OMNI, enabling anyone to verify the supply chain journey and authenticate a product's origins. 

One of the key challenges in supply chain management is identifying the plethora of materials and products everywhere, any time. The traceability software solution provides pharma and healthcare companies a way to give each of these items a digital identity, which can be placed on the blockchain to help prevent fraud. It also provides a way to trace products on their journey to market, and ensure their provenance. 

For patients, the solution helps improve safety by enabling tamper-proof evidence as well as product authentication, and can also connect the patient to instructions and help lines simply by scanning the tag.

"Everyday pharma and healthcare represents one of the fastest growing markets across industry verticals," said Yonathan Lapchik, CEO of SUKU. "By providing visibility into data that historically has been segmented and only available to a handful of supply chain participants, this software enables pharma and healthcare companies to expand their reach to this under-utilized customer base. We are very excited about the combination of our blockchain-powered tracking and tracing capabilities with Avery Dennison’s and EM Microelectronic's tagging and management system."

“This solution enables brands to create a digital identity that survives beyond the supply chain into post purchase applications,” said Bill Barr, RFID product manager at Avery Dennison Smartrac. “A single inlay containing a digital ID is now effective in both the RAIN (UHF) RFID B2B world and the B2C world where NFC is ubiquitous. It is the bridge between what the company controls and what the consumer controls.” 

“Avery Dennison’s best-in-class dual-frequency RAINFC labels powered by EM Microelectronic’s em|echo-V is the ideal physical world data carrier to the SUKU OMNI blockchain-based traceability platform. Combining RAIN RFID supply chain management functionalities with seamless NFC consumer engagement and Web Authentication, em|echo-V enables end-to-end product lifecycle management for patient-oriented applications,” said Paul Muller, EM’s RFID Business Unit Manager. To eliminate adoption barriers, the solution is built for the needs of both small and large healthcare and pharmaceutical brands in mind, and includes the following bundle:

  • 10,000 RAINFC Belt DF tags, pre-encoded using Avery Dennison Smartrac’s digital identity and tag management platform and designed to be redirected via SUKU’s cloud services. 
  • EM Microelectronic’s Web Authentication RAINFC dual-frequency IC.
  • 90-days access to SUKU OMNI blockchain-based traceability platform.

The Plug-and-Play Bundle is available as of now. 

Media contact
Christian Achenbach
Communications Manager, Avery Dennison Smartrac
christian.achenbach@eu.averydennison.com

About Avery Dennison
Avery Dennison (NYSE: AVY) is a global materials science company specializing in the design and manufacture of a wide variety of labeling and functional materials. The company’s products, which are used in nearly every major industry, include pressure-sensitive materials for labels and graphic applications; tapes and other bonding solutions for industrial, medical, and retail applications; tags, labels and embellishments for apparel; and radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions serving retail apparel and other markets. Headquartered in Glendale, California, the company employs more than 32,000 employees in more than 50 countries. Reported sales in 2020 were $7.0 billion. Learn more at www.averydennison.com.

About SUKU
SUKU aims to make commerce more transparent and efficient with blockchain-powered supply-chain solutions. By leveraging the traceability enabled by blockchain, SUKU provides brands and retailers with the transparency they need to meet the demands of a growing base of conscious consumers. To incentivize the participation of small suppliers, SUKU rewards participants with tokens that grant the holder access to key financial services, such as microloans, that are not otherwise available to them. The SUKU team consists of a group of successful entrepreneurs and corporate leaders with a background in supply chain and blockchain from Deloitte’s Blockchain Lab. SUKU is developed by its parent company Citizens Reserve, Inc. headquartered in Los Gatos, California. For more information, please head to www.suku.world, engage with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter or chat with our team on Telegram.

About EM Microelectronic
EM Microelectronic, a company of the Swatch Group (SWX: UHR), designs and manufactures Ultra-low power ICs for small portable devices and green IoT.
A leading Swiss innovator, EM has been serving the RFID market for 30 years with passive, active and semi-active ICs covering all frequency ranges: LF, HF, UHF, 2.4 GHz.
EM has pioneered the adoption of UHF RFID in retail, with the first mass deployments more than a decade ago, paving the way for the emergence of RAIN RFID, and continues to drive new applications with its em|echo family, combining RAIN RFID and NFC in a single RAINFC IC, enabling new consumer experience and product authentication functionalities on top of traditional use cases. Learn more at www.emmicroelectronic.com.

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