We all prefer buying fresh fruits and vegetables from the market or grocery store. But sometimes it becomes difficult to evaluate the freshness through the appearance of the fruits or vegetables. Hence Israeli startup Clarifruit has come with the solution. The start-up uses computer optics and machine learning technology to quickly evaluate the quality, ripeness, and freshness of fruits and vegetables.
Founded in 2016, Clarifruit developed a produce monitoring mobile app that scans fruits and vegetables and analyzes their condition to determine whether or not they are ready to go to market. According to the company’s website, the Clarifruit app can analyze data on such elements as the color, size, firmness, and sugar content of a fruit or vegetable. The app can also detect imperfections such as stains.
The app allows growers to instantly asses produce and transmit the data throughout the supply chain. The goal, the company said in a statement Wednesday, is to cut down on food waste and provide an alternative to expensive and time-consuming manual testing.
According to the Times of Israel, the Israeli startup Aclar Tech has developed a Mobile App that allows monitoring, in real time, the ripeness, freshness, and quality of fruit and vegetables.
The Ness Ziona, Israel-based firm’s accelerometer will change the way farmers make their decisions and will “revolutionize” the global food market by helping prevent wasted products and making them accessible to wider populations, the company says on its website.
Today, farmers decide when to pick fruit based on instinct or lab tests. “These methods are extremely inefficient and not standardized, leading to a yearly loss of approximately 50 percent of worldwide grown fruit” and vegetables, the company said, with some wasted even before it gets to consumers’ homes.
With the Aclaro meter, users scan the fruit with their built-in smartphone camera and with a standard portable molecular sensor. This captures a large set of measurements about the fruit and its environment, revealing data like the fruit’s sugar content, acidity, firmness, weight and color, as well as its GPS location and weather conditions at the time of sampling. The data is then uploaded to the cloud and is processed by a tailor made algorithm that compares the data to tens of thousands of other samples of previously inspected fruit.
The algorithm then grades the scanned fruit for freshness, ripeness and quality within a few seconds, the company said. This data can help farmers decide when to pick their produce and monitor its freshness as it moves along the food chain via packaging houses to retailers and end users.
AclarTech has just completed a pilot project with a local grape producer and is set to start a beta test with agricultural entities in Israel, including the Agriculture Ministry, the Plant Council, the agricultural research organization Volcani Center and wineries.
Competing technologies have apps using the SCIO spectrometers, the company said, but none has the data repository that creates standardized measurements, nor do they take visual information into account.
AclarTech is part of the portfolio companies of TechForGood, an organization operating in Israel and South East Asia that aims to help startups to use technology to solve social and environmental challenges.
