Meat tracked with RFID
Bereket Döner, one of Turkey’s largest producers of frozen and ready-to-serve meat products, is using radio frequency identification to track its goods as they are loaded onto pallets, weighed prior to delivery.At the company factory in Istanbul, the meat is cooked, seasoned, cut and boxed before being stored in freezers prior to being shipped to restaurants, mostly located in Turkey.
Using a RFID system provided by RFID Enabled Solutions (RES), the company can automatically identify each box of product. This not only records when meat is weighed prior to shipment, it also tells which customer’s order is being filled at any given time. An added benefit is that it also prevents employee theft, since RFID readers at the doorways detect if unsold, tagged meat is being removed and issues an instant alert.
The system includes RES’s AIMS software to manage data encoded in tags placed on meat before it is completely stretch-wrapped and boxed, then shock-frozen. More readers are installed at the weighing station, as well as in doorways. It was installed in 2012 for use by the morning shift but the firm is now looking into expanding it for other shifts.
Once an order is received, the meat—which typically weighs between 4 and 70 kg—is removed from the freezer, loaded onto pallets and weighed. The details stored in the company’s software include the meat’s stock-keeping unit (SKU), production date and weight. To identify a particular product, Bereket Döner had been scanning a bar code on its boxes, which the company felt was excessively time-consuming. So, if the product sat outside the freezer for too long (while staff scanned the bar codes on every box) prior to loading, spoilage could result.
