Every year, tens of thousands of tons of avocadoes are thrown into the trash or compost. Whether on the farm or in our fridges, the delicious fruit is one of the most difficult to get right when it comes to determining ripeness, resulting in a whole lot of wasted food.
One startup hoping to help us reduce the amount of avocadoes going to waste is OneThird, a startup out of The Netherlands that has built a line of spectral scanners that determine the freshness of an avocado.
When a OneThird scanner looks at the spectral fingerprint of an avocado, it compares the data gathered to its database to determine how ripe the fruit is and then sends the information to its app. You can see the scanner in action in the video below:
According to company CES Marko Snikkers, because farmers and distributors often don’t know how ripe avocados are, they will often ship the produce to retailers when it should have gone to a processor or some other application that can make use of ripe or overripe produce.
“What we try to do is give our customers the data so they know if it should go to the store or be repurposed for other methods such as dry freeing or juices,” said Snikkers.
The company debuted their in-store version and the quality lab version of their scanners at CES 2023.
OneThird isn’t the only company with a spectral imaging scanner targeted at grocery retailers to determine avocado freshness. In October of last year, Apeel debuted their avocado scanner, which it built using technology acquired from Impact Vision.
I for one am looking forward to seeing one of these scanners in my local grocery store, not only because it’s hard to determine freshness without it, but also because it would hopefully prevent me and others from squeezing the fruit.
“We all squeeze,” said Snikkers. “And that is definitely damaging the avocadoes.”
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