Conair, a U.S. manufacturer and marketer of health and beauty products and kitchen appliances, is taking another step toward using radio frequency identification to track every item it sells, from factory to store. The company's RFID-focused subsidiary, United Security Applications ID (USA ID), is developing an RFID interrogator that will be utilized in Conair's Costa Rica and Chinese factories to encode tags applied to products as they are manufactured and prepared for shipping. Once the devices are put in place--which is slated to occur in the first half of 2010--USA ID expects Conair to tag all of the products it manufactures, says Paul Arguin, Conair/USA ID's director of technology and engineering.
