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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Driscoll's

Driscoll’s is Using Consumer Physics Technology to Bring Sweeter Berries to Market

Driscoll’s announced last week that it will be using Consumer Physics‘ SCiO technology to improve the sweetness of the berries it sells.

Before we get into the technology, it’s good to understand how Driscoll’s works. As Brie Reiter Smith, Driscoll’s Director of Quality Systems Design, explained to me by phone this week, Driscoll’s has roughly 1,000 berry growers in its network. The quality of the berries it receives though, can very greatly — even from growers in the same region.

A decade or so ago, this disparity wasn’t a huge deal, but as Reiter Smith explained, that has changed. “Over the years, the breeding programs and supply chains have improved,” Reiter Smith said. “Consumers are more aware of how flavorful fruit can be.”

In other words, consumers know what they want, and they want sweeter berries. To incentivize growers to produce sweeter berries, Driscoll’s began analyzing berry sugar content, which is measured on the Brix scale. Traditionally, Driscoll’s had done this Brix measurement by hand by selecting sample berries, crushing them and using a refractomer to analyze the juice. But this process is time consuming and destructive. On the scale that Driscoll’s operates, that’s a lot of product that goes to testing instead of store shelves to be sold.

This is where Consumer Physics and its SCiO comes in. We covered the company before, back in 2017, when its handheld near infrared spectrometry scanner was being used by Cargill to measure dry matter in cattle forage, and then again in 2019 when it was used to measure moisture in cacao beans.

Since then, Consumer Physics has developed the larger SCiO Cup, which, in the case of Driscoll’s, allows an entire clamshell of strawberries to be scanned at one time. Berries are scanned using the near infrared spectrometry, a cloud-based system that analyzes the findings and provides the Brix measurement via mobile app. This automated bulk approach is faster because berries don’t need to be hand selected and crushed. Since the berries aren’t destroyed, they can be returned to be sold.

We’re seeing more of this type of high-tech, automated scanning enter the food supply chain. AgShift and Intello Labs both use computer vision and AI to assess the quality of food and establish fair market prices. AgShift’s bulk scanner, Hydra, was actually being used by Driscoll’s back in 2019.

Driscoll’s has a reward system for growers that produce higher-value berries. With the results of the Brix analysis, farmers can adjust their berry growing and harvesting to achieve that higher sugar content. That, in turn, means sweeter berries at your local store.

According to last week’s press announcement, Driscoll’s will start integrating SCiO measurement this month in the U.S. Mexico and Canada. By the end of the year, the company will rely exclusively on SCiO for Brix measurement in the roughly 2 million quality inspections it conducts annually in North America.

Plenty and Driscoll’s Partner to Grow Strawberries Indoors

San Francisco Bay Area-based vertical farming startup Plenty and well-known berry brand Driscoll’s announced a partnership today to grow strawberries year-round via controlled-environment indoor farms. The partnership will use Plenty’s indoor farming technology and incorporate Driscoll’s proprietary genetics for strawberries, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Plenty hinted at strawberries (and tomatoes) more than a year ago, when it unveiled its high-tech vertical farm Tigris. Currently, the company is best known for its mixtures of leafy greens, which it grows indoors via the hydronponic method. Plenty’s facilities also utilize sensors, LED light mixtures, and temperature and air control to create the optimal growing environment for plants.

Leafy greens are still one of the most common crops grown in these controlled-environment farms, and for a few of good reasons. For one thing, they’re one of the most popular produce types among U.S. consumers today. They are also far more delicate than, say, a mango, making it harder to transport them without spoilage. Leafy greens also yield more crop in a smaller space compared to something like a row of sweetcorn, and they can be harvested faster. Something like a strawberry takes more time to grow, and one profile of Plenty last year noted that it can take up to nine months to understand how a strawberry plant performs inside a controlled environment operation.

Lately, though, more ag tech companies have announced plans to grow more than arugula and herbs. Most notably, a Singapore-based company called SinGrow has employed its proprietary vertical farming tech to grow strawberries on a rack designed specifically for that fruit. SinGrow also creates its own strawberry breeds. Unfold, which just raised $30 million, has added cucumbers and tomatoes to its roster. Plenty itself said at the time of the Tigris launch that it wants to grow “exotic” fruits and vegetables, though as yet the company hasn’t named specific crops.

Strawberries aren’t exactly exotic, but for vertical farming, they are a logical next crop after leafy greens. Plenty’s home state of California produces over 91 percent of the country’s entire strawberry supply, and that fruit is also high on U.S. consumers’ lists.

To start, Driscoll’s will grow strawberries at Plenty’s Laramie, Wyoming facility. Driscoll’s Chairman and CEO J. Miles Reiter said in today’s press release that this partnership “will create a competitive market edge.” While that remains to be seen, one thing we can expect with a fair amount of certainty is that more companies will be growing strawberries via controlled environments in the months to come. 

AgShift Launches Hydra, its AI-Powered Food Quality Analyzer for Bulk Inspections

AgShift is on a mission to remove human biases from food quality inspection by using computer vision and artificial intelligence. It started off doing this by having inspectors use smartphone cameras to snap pictures of food (like berries), which were then analyzed by AgShift‘s machine learning algorithms to assess quality.

While the company’s software platform may bring objectivity to quality assessment, having inspectors manually take photos of fruit was still mostly manual. And when you consider that one state, California, produces one billion pounds of one fruit, strawberries, each year, these manual inspections can still take quite a bit of time. In addition to accuracy, there is a need for speed in the supply chain.

This is why AgShift created Hydra F100 BQ, a new hardware analyzer that the company officially announced today. With Hydra, companies can do more bulk inspection and thereby faster assessment of food like berries and edible nuts.

We wrote about this hardware analyzer before, but that was when it was in the prototype/development stage. Today’s news takes the wraps off the full industrial version of the device.

The Hydra is a kiosk like machine with a touchscreen that is installed at a food processing facility. Instead of inspectors manually selecting and inspecting samples, whole trays of samples can now be inserted into the machine to be assessed at once. The Hydra has cameras above and below the fruit to capture images of this bulk sample, which is sent to AgShift’s cloud platform to analyze it for weight, size, color and to check for defects like mold or bruising. The result is the same objective analysis, but AgShift says it’s now done in half the time of manual inspections.

“When you do a manual inspection [of strawberries], you are inspecting roughly 4 to 6 clamshells in a sample size, roughly 100 berries in total,” said Miku Jha, Founder and CEO of AgShift. “[That] takes 6 to 8 minutes with manual inspection. Hydra does it in under three minutes.”

AgShift’s Hydra has already been running in trials with both Driscoll’s for strawberry inspection and Olam for cashews.

By removing manual inspections by hand, AgShift says it can also reduce waste because. As we reported last June:

[Jha] said that traditionally cashews are examined by hand, with inspectors looking at one or two pounds of nuts at a time. That takes time, and after being touched, those particular nuts need to be discarded. Both time and waste can add up when you’re processing literally tons of cashews. Using AgShift’s analyzer, sampling can be done faster and samples do not need to be thrown out because of the workflow at the processing facility.

In a recent phone interview, Jha told The Spoon that the company was still determining the business model around Hydra, but that it wasn’t in the business of selling boxes. Instead, the Hydra would most likely be leased with the price of the software subscription coming in around $4,000 per month, depending on the volume of assessments.

AgShift isn’t alone in the computer-vision-for-food-inspection space, Bengaluru-based Intello Labs does much the same thing for farmers in India.

Earlier this month, AgShift raised another seed round from CerraCap Ventures. The amount wasn’t disclosed at the time, but in the Hydra press announcement, AgShift says it has raised $5 million in seed funding. Since just about a year ago AgShift announced a $2 million raise, it looks like the recent raise was for $3 million.