Avery Dennison empowers supply chain transparency with new digital venture platform

23 Mar 2021 --- Avery Dennison is launching atma.io, a digital venture bridging the physical and digital worlds. atma.io is a connected product cloud: an end-to-end platform capable of creating, assigning and managing unique digital identities for every physical item in the world. 

The global Fortune 500 company says atma.io completely reimagines how supply chains operate, how brands connect with individual consumers, and how global organizations can achieve their sustainability and transparency goals.

Currently, atma.io manages over 10 billion unique items and adds over 50 new connected products to the platform every second.

“Facing a clear need for item-level visibility and the gap in the market, Avery Dennison saw a unique opportunity to stand up a new digital venture to pioneer an industry-leading end-to-end connected product cloud,” explains Francisco Melo, vice president and general manager at Avery Dennison Smartrac.Innova Market Insights flagged e-commerce as its top packaging trend 2021.

“It’s the expression of our Intelligent Labels vision: a platform that connects physical and digital worlds by assigning unique digital IDs to everyday items.” 

“With atma.io, Avery Dennison is now able to bridge both worlds by coupling our progressive family of digital triggers and labeling technologies with the power of data in our atma.io platform all the way to the ‘wafer’ level.”

Business benefits
Avery Dennison says businesses will benefit from the ability to “join up” their supply chain “as never before.” Brands can accurately communicate how a product is made and launch business models like “recommerce,” peer-to-peer commerce, and direct-to-consumer.

Meanwhile, consumers can check everything from product provenance and authenticity to details about care and content instructions for apparel items, obtain expiry and recall information for perishable products, and enjoy unique consumer experiences based on each product interaction’s specific context.atma.io is being deployed for COVID-19 vaccine temperature monitoring.

Besides being chosen for multiple scaled implementations by global brands and retailers, atma.io is also being deployed for food supply chain traceability and developed for real-time temperature monitoring for individual COVID-19 vaccine vials.

Max Winograd, vice president, connected products, Avery Dennison Smartrac and co-founder of atma.io, adds: “The atma.io team has launched the connected product cloud purpose-built for today’s world of rapid disruption and digital transformation.”

“Our north star is trust and a more sustainable and connected world. Our platform is designed for anyone to build on top of atma.io to enable every use case for connected products throughout every industry and every step of the value chain.”

Consumer-product interactions
Global sportswear brand Adidas is utilizing the cloud-based platform for circularity and unique consumer-product interactions.The platform empowers organizations to achieve sustainability and transparency goals.

“Adidas integrated atma.io’s connected product cloud into our Infinite Play initiative to scale our ability to buy-back products and give them a second life,” details David Quass, global director, brand sustainability at Adidas.

“The program was the first of many use cases we will look to enable with atma.io and Avery Dennison to achieve our connected product vision and our sustainability goals.” 

Designed to be open, easily integrated and highly flexible, atma.io can solve the “market pain” of supply chains using different digital triggers on products, such as UHF RFID, NFC (Near-Field Communication) or even QR codes, by enabling all item-level events and product data to be connected in one end-to-end platform, Avery Dennison indicates.atma.io is also being deployed for food supply chain traceability.

The atma.io app store enables brands to tap into an ecosystem of applications to unlock every connected product use case imaginable. Also, developers and partners can now build on top of atma.io’s end-to-end platform and unlock new growth channels.

The atma.io connected product cloud offers a wide-ranging portfolio of modules to unlock specific use cases to help achieve business objectives like consumer engagement, operational excellence, brand protection, and sustainability.

Avery Dennison Smartrac also recently unveiled Circus Pro and Circus Pro Flex NFC inlays for secure end-to-end brand protection.

Edited by Joshua Poole