Impinj Extends Support for Japan’s Electronic Tag Initiative at Convenience, Drug Stores

Impinj, Inc. extended its support for electronic tagging in Japan’s convenience stores and drug stores.

Technology innovations provided by the Impinj M700 endpoint IC family enable wireless connectivity for individual items, such as food, beverages, and medications, thereby enhancing inventory visibility and enabling frictionless consumer self-checkout.

Impinj enables Internet connectivity for billions of everyday items using RAIN RFID, a battery-free radio technology ideally suited to identifying, locating, and authenticating items in the supply chain and in stores. New Impinj M700 ICs leverage Moore’s Law to provide more functionality and better performance, in a significantly smaller IC, than any other RAIN RFID IC currently available.

The Impinj M700 family of endpoint ICs will deliver a significant step toward enabling connectivity for an estimated 100 billion items per year in Japan:
Smaller, higher-performing endpoint ICs enable smaller, higher-performing RAIN inlays that can be embedded into product packaging;
Shrinking and enhancing the endpoint IC logic enables frictionless point-of-sale and RAIN-based loss prevention while optimizing efficiencies and costs.

The Impinj M700 IC family’s capabilities align with the goals set in declarations by the Japanese Government, major convenience store chains, and the Japan Association of Chain Drug Stores to attach RAIN RFID tags to all items those stores sell in Japan by 2025. Rollouts follow multiple successful pilots in which convenience stores added RAIN RFID tags to improve inventory visibility and enable consumer self-checkout.

“…[W]e are working on digitalization of our retail locations to create the convenience store of the future,” said Kunitsugu Makino, deputy senior VP, Lawson Inc. “Once RAIN RFID technology is implemented throughout our entire supply chain and in all the products in our stores, the increased functionality enabled by the Impinj M700 ICs will give us better item-level inventory visibility, while also allowing us to deliver frictionless consumer self-checkout and loss prevention.”


“Impinj’s vision to connect every item in our everyday world to the cloud is fully aligned with Japan’s convenience store and drugstore initiatives. Our new family of Impinj M700 ICs shows the path to embedding 100s of billions of Impinj RAIN RFID ICs into everyday items,” added Chris Diorio, Impinj founder and CEO.