Radio Frequency Identification in the Food Industry: Preliminary results from a bibliometric analysis on case studies

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology allows for automatic and real-time identification of items, by simply attaching a tag to them. In the last years, it was implemented in several contexts mainly for tracking purposes, including the food supply chain and the related logistics activities. In this field, in fact, traceability is essential and above all mandatory, for guaranteeing food quality, customer safety and waste reduction. The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary results from a bibliometric analysis on case studies and applications, in order to derive the last trends. In more detail, bibliographic research was carried out through the Scopus database, and a total of 52 documents resulted from a query having “RFID”, “food industry” and “case study” as keywords. Typical bibliographic features were investigated (i.e., temporal evolution, type of study, most common journal and conference, most prolific authors, geography, citations, keywords), but also interesting contents-related issues were derived, namely the type of food in question, the main aim of the RFID implementation and the level of tagging (i.e., item-, secondary or pallet- level). Research turned out to be quite steady over time among the sample, with most of the published documents produced in the United States and Italy; moreover, an interest towards the item-level tagging was also deduced.