Design of RFID Sensor Tag for Cheese Quality Monitoring

This paper discusses the design of an RFID tag for detecting the maturation level of Swiss-type cheese during its ripening process. Several parameters such as carbon dioxide concentration, wheel size, and pressure inside cheese packaging were studied in order to determine the correlation between their variations and the level of cheese maturation. Two configurations of RFID sensor tags were designed and measured. The first sensor tag configuration was based on a stretch sensor in order to detect the increase of the cheese wheel diameter when it starts to swell due to maturation. The second RFID tag design was based on a low power pressure sensor in order to monitor the pressure variation inside the packaging of cheese during the ripening process. Results obtained from both configurations showed a significant variation of the sensors values during the ripening process.