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•Case Study: RFID Revitalizes The Vending Machine Business With Deli-Fresh Food In A Self-Service Checkout

Fast Track Convenience teamed up with Freedom Shopping to create a self-service RFID kiosk for the food service market. They discovered that they were the first. The conventional wisdom is that item-level tracking with RFID is ten years away," says Rob Simmons, cofounder of Freedom Shopping. "We've been doing this for two years, with a strong return on investment."

"The only practical way to do an unmanned application like this is to use RFID," says Simmons. "We were new to RFID, and had heard that you couldn't tag metals and liquids and you couldn't do item-level tagging profitably. But that wasn't true."

Today, the Freedom Shopping System is in production at more than 20 minimarts across the United States, including five customers of Fast Track Convenience in the Detroit area. At one customer, sales have increased threefold and profits per item more than doubled since the introduction of the RFID kiosk.

The creation of the first successful item-level tracking application in food service wasn't without its difficulties. "The consumer experience had to be perfect," says Simmons. "It's not just in front of consumers, as a barcode-based self-service checkout is, but it's unmanned so we have to make sure nothing can go wrong," he says.

"You stand in front of the kiosk, run up everything you've presented, hit OK to confirm the transaction, give your thumbprint and walk out the door," says Simmons. A voice guides the customer through the transaction, if assistance is needed. Customers can pay by "stored account" using their thumbprints, cash or credit. Transactions with thumb-print identification take three seconds, and transactions with cash or credit take about 10 seconds.

Click Here To Download:
•Case Study: RFID Revitalizes The Vending Machine Business With Deli-Fresh Food In A Self-Service Checkout