China environment daily reported that a large number of unopened foods in Japan are discarded every day because they have passed the shelf life, causing huge waste. Japan's Ministry of economy and industry recently carried out a large-scale verification experiment of smart supply chain, trying to solve the problem of food waste through the dynamic management of information such as the delivery, purchase and shelf life of goods by radio frequency tags.

This experiment consists of three parts: one is the cooperation between all participants in the supply chain, reading the RFID tags posted on the goods when they are delivered or purchased, storing the log data to the supply chain information sharing system, and realizing the visual management of the goods circulation. The second is the interaction between stores and consumers, mainly through radio frequency tags to manage the shelf life of the store's stock of goods, discount and promote the goods near the expiration of the shelf life. The third is to deal with some household chores according to the radio frequency tags, such as sorting the garbage according to the radio frequency tags on the goods and garbage cans, cooking according to the radio frequency tags on the food and seasoning bottles, etc.

The second part is the dynamic pricing of retail stores. According to Li Ming, a staff member of the public relations office of Rosen group, a Japanese convenience store chain, who participated in the experiment, the dynamic pricing experiment uses RF tags to manage the shelf life of commodities in real time. If it is found that there is a product approaching the expiration date of the shelf life, the system will automatically push the product promotion information to the consumers participating in the experiment through the communication software. If consumers buy the product according to the promotion information, they can enjoy cash discount or rebate at the time of checkout.

Li Ming said that at present, convenience stores spend a lot of manpower every day to check the shelf life of food one by one, and put discount stickers on the food close to the expiration date of the shelf life. Such as rice balls, sushi and sandwiches, which have a shelf life of only one day, need to be checked two or three times a day. With the help of RFID tags, the management of commodities can be accurate to a single commodity, which can be automatically completed by the system.

According to the statistics of Japan's consumer agency, Japan throws away about 28.42 million tons of food waste every year. The food that should have been eaten but wasted accounts for about 1 / 4 of the food waste, a large part of which is discarded due to the expiration of the shelf life or near the expiration of the shelf life.

Source: China Environmental News