Pilot Scheme to Replace Manual Labelling with RFID Technology

In a Dutch fruit orchard, the harvest has a small paper problem. Thousands of stickers must be printed, attached to picking crates, and replaced as the crop moves through the season — a daily chore that turns a reusable container into a temporary noticeboard. That routine is still common on fruit farms.

The proposed alternative is less visible: a permanent RFID tag fixed to each crate. Instead of asking a worker to identify every container by hand, the system would give the crate an electronic identity that can be read as it moves through the orchard and the wider fruit operation.

A Crate with a Long Memory

Agromanager, Munckhof Fruit Tech Innovators, and five fruit growers are testing the approach in a joint study. The trial is aimed at the unglamorous points where harvest records are made — beside picking crews, stacks of crates, and the steady movement of fruit from trees toward storage and packing. The pilot is being conducted in the Netherlands.

The tags are designed to remain usable for at least ten years, giving them a working life closer to that of the crate than to that of a harvest label. That durability is central to the proposed system.

The Harvest-Time Test

The attraction is straightforward. Printing, applying, checking, and changing labels takes hands during the busiest part of the year, when growers are already coordinating pickers, fruit quality, crate movements, and delivery schedules. The pilot’s aim is to remove that manual labelling step from the harvest workflow.

RFID will not make a crate self-driving, and it will not solve every recordkeeping problem on a farm. It does offer a way to attach an enduring identity to an object that is already being moved around. The practical question is whether that identity can be read reliably enough, often enough, to justify changing familiar routines.

For fruit businesses, the potential payoff is measured in fewer touches around each crate and less time spent maintaining labels. If the system works at orchard scale, it could reduce labor costs while making crate movements easier to track. The result would be a modest piece of hardware carrying more of the administrative burden that currently follows the crop.

The next useful evidence will be practical rather than flashy: whether the tags keep working, whether growers can fold them into existing harvest records, and whether the savings survive contact with a real picking season.