The world has more people to feed than ever before.
As the global population grows Annual increase of about 1%the demand for food production increases. But producing more food also has an impact on the environment and can compromise its quality.
A Singaporean company has developed new technology aimed at meeting this challenge.
ProfilePrint leverages its patented digital fingerprint technology to quickly analyze the identity and quality of ingredients, helping agricultural businesses save money and time.
“If you look at raw material trading today, you typically find that the producers are farmers, there is a group of traders who buy and sell, and then there are the end buyers who buy and then manufacture,” said CEO Alan Lai, founder of ProfilePrint. Speaking on CNBC’s “CNBC Tech: The Edge.”
The problem, he explained, lies in the system of multiple rounds of physical food sample exchanges between buyers and sellers, which is replicated “in every part of the supply chain”.
“So the sampling workload…is very large,” he said.
“ProfilePrint digitizes food ingredients so that buyers and sellers no longer need to physically ship samples, allowing us to significantly reduce logistics costs, overhead and carbon footprint,” Lai added.
On the surface, the technology is relatively simple. Companies can create their own artificial intelligence models on ProfilePrint’s platform, which can evaluate whether raw materials are suitable for what they are looking for. Traders can also build AI models for specific customers to determine whether a product meets their preferences based on criteria such as appearance or flavor.
At its core is a combination of wave detectors in materials and artificial intelligence. Machine learning means the technology can analyze food samples at a molecular level and identify food quality within seconds.
Reilly demonstrated the technique using coffee beans.
“Maybe one or two beans accidentally fermented incorrectly, or maybe we had an insect in our beans that made the whole bag taste bad, but if you can’t pick out that one or two, then you can’t actually sell that one. beans.
“So the molecules are captured and converted into a digital fingerprint that contains this information.”
At this time, artificial intelligence will combine industrial knowledge to analyze fingerprints and generate prices or judgments in a few seconds.
In addition to predicting quality and flavor profiles, the company’s ingredient quality platform provides customers with options to balance quality and price.
Powered by its patented software, PowerPrint’s technology is making huge strides in solving one of the coffee industry’s most challenging problems; finding defective products that are invisible to the naked eye.
The ultimate goal is to streamline the entire supply chain and ultimately eliminate human error.
ProfilePrint isn’t the only budding food quality and AI startup. US-based startup Aromyx combines biotechnology, data science and artificial intelligence to help companies match the taste and smell of product development.
Brightseed is a California-based startup that uses its artificial intelligence platform, Forager, to identify compounds in plants and microorganisms and understand their health benefits. They are then used to create health solutions in food, beverages and supplements.
global inspiration
The start-up’s origins date back to 2017, after Lai traveled across the African continent and China.
In Uganda, Lai saw farmers trying to sell food ingredients at bulk prices.
“They don’t have the expertise to evaluate how good their product is, so even if the quality is good, they usually only sell it for one price. What if there was a faster way to democratize this expertise so that even at the producer level And the same goes for them, they can make better decisions,” he said.
Today, the startup is headquartered in Singapore and generates 90% of its revenue outside of Singapore. However, in the global market, Lai’s startup is deployed in more than 60 locations on six continents, thanks to “digital services where customers can subscribe to our solutions anytime and anywhere.”
By 2018, ProfilePrint attracted the attention of multiple investors, including Yukihiro Maru, founder and CEO of Leave a Nest Capital, a deep tech startup ecosystem established in Japan as early as 2002.
The entrepreneur expanded his company into the ASEAN region of emerging and developing markets in Southeast Asia.
Maru is a firm believer in the importance of technology and artificial intelligence in the next generation of deep tech startups, and says ProfilePrint is well-positioned to help agricultural businesses around the world.
Maru told CNBC in October at the Singapore Innovation and Technology Week conference, also known as SWITCH, that he believed ProfilePrint could apply its technology to markets beyond coffee and tea and make a name for itself in the food safety space.
Correction: This article has been updated with the correct geographic distribution of ProfilePrint revenue.
