Sucafina - a leading sustainable Farm to Roaster, Swiss-based coffee company - and ProfilePrint - a Singapore-based AI-driven predictive and prescriptive food ingredient profiler - have announced a co-investment in Csmart, a Brazil-based developer of AI-powered image recognition technologies for green coffee grading.
“We feel confident that Csmart’s proven image recognition technology will bring shared value to producers, importers, and QC professionals alike. This is not about replacing people but empowering QC professionals to become even more productive,” said Dave Behrends, Managing Partner & Head of Trading at Sucafina.
Csmart was founded by producer, quality control professional and software developer Francisco Massucci Silveira. The company’s latest technology can rapidly scan a sample of green coffee beans and accurately count the defective beans in minutes. Impending improvements to the software will see each defective bean scanned and identified.
The technology will reduce the time taken for such a repetitive task and improves and accelerates communication between QC teams, and reduce carbon emissions from shipping countless green coffee samples around the world. Instead, sellers will be able to provide buyers with a report on the beans for their review.
“Ultimately, we hope that collecting and analyzing data on a large scale will unveil new and valuable information about coffee production, enabling the incorporation of data-driven decisions throughout the coffee value chain,” said Massucci.
The technology will complement ProfilePrint systems, which incorporate data from multiple sources to enable users to compare and ascertain the suitability of ingredients without a traditional sensory evaluation.
“Csmart’s image recognition technology provides additional key data points for our global ProfilePrint solution, bringing us closer to our goal of a device-agnostic data platform. It also increases the range and accuracy of our prediction capability, empowering buyers and sellers across the supply chain to increase productivity and significantly reduce carbon footprint,” said Alan Lai, founder and CEO of ProfilePrint.
Csmart technology hopes to make objective green grading more available and democratize information about coffee quality.
