Tesco is calling for radio frequency identification (RFID) suppliers and standards bodies to address logistical issues exposed by its trials of the technology.

The retailer says that immature European standards and a lack of packaged products have presented challenges in pilots of the technology - which it calls radio barcode - to track stock and respond to customer trends.

'There is theory and then there is real life,' Simon Palinkas, Tesco's radio barcode programme manager, told the Retail Solutions 2005 conference. 'There are just no solutions out there, so we had to look for partners.'

He says that even with a Tesco-led team in place, the initial six-week trial of RFID-enabled store replenishment systems across 13 sites and one distribution centre last year revealed 'performance that was not what was expected'.

'The biggest headache today is tag quality; it is nowhere near a 100 per cent read rate, which is where it needs to be,' he said. 'Radio frequency characteristics are hugely affected by environmental factors.'

Palinkas says EU RFID regulations are 'extremely tough', and that the European radio frequency standard EN302 208, which is undergoing ratification, falls well short of its US equivalent.

But he says rapid development, test and deployment cycles helped Tesco to overcome problems with hardware power output levels, the speed of reading tags, and the number of readers able to operate in the same area at once.

'We need to prove that this technology works in real life,' he said. 'But I believe radio barcodes will follow the same path traditional barcodes did some years ago.'

Neil Macehiter, retail technology specialist at analyst Macehiter Ward-Dutton, says Tesco's experiences should not deter businesses from RFID, because they are 'indicative of any technology in an early-adopter phase'.

'Tesco has clearly analysed the opportunities around RFID,' he said. 'This message is a call to the vendors. For companies, recognising that RFID is not a silver bullet, and clearly qualifying the business case first, is key.'

Tesco started a full-scale rollout of RFID for tracking pallets of goods through its supply chain - from distribution to each store - at the beginning of this year (Computing, 19 January 2005).