Wake up and smell the coffee: Check your coffee beans’ quality using ProfilePrint’s AI tool

In 2016, during one of his official trips to Uganda, Alan Lai came across a group of chia seed farmers who harvested their crops under the parching sun.

Lai, who was working in the investment industry, bought some at a fraction of the price sold at the retail stores but wasn’t sure of the quality. Despite the rapid digitalisation globally, there was no easy and quick way to check the seeds’ quality.

“Being an artificial intelligence enthusiast, I saw an opportunity to leverage AI to rapidly ascertain the quality of the seeds conveniently so that farmers can be paid better and consumers pay less,” says Lai, who went on to start a food ingredient search engine.

That was the beginning of ProfilePrint, an AI-driven predictive and prescriptive profiler.

Established in July 2017, Singapore-based ProfilePrint provides users with accessible, affordable, and portable solutions to ascertain and predict the quality and profile of a food ingredient at the point of use “within seconds”. Its combination of sensor technology and SaaS platform can be used across the whole supply chain.

“The AI technology takes a molecular snapshot of a food ingredient (seeds, coffee, cocoa beans or rice grains) and allows users across the supply chain to access the digital ingredient signature and ascertain the suitability,” says Lai.

ProfilePrint has deployed its solution globally to Europe, Africa, Latin America, China, Japan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

The startup first unveiled its fingerprint prediction technology in June 2021 in the Singapore Coffee Association auction, where it predicted the Q-grading score, taste parameters and critical attributes such as moisture and density for all the auctioned coffee beans. It currently serves some of the world’s largest food conglomerates, such as Louis Dreyfus, Olam, Sucafina, as well as mid-sizes traders, local cooperatives and farmers.

Seeks to replace traditional methods

There are several traditional ways to physically grade food samples across multiple stages of the global supply chain. They vary from laboratory testing, which is expensive and time-consuming, to human tasters, which is onerous and can be subjective.

Crops are often visually graded at the farm level, and farmers are paid based on volume, regardless of the crop quality, which does not incentivise them to improve farming methods. Farmers don’t get the benefits despite the increasing demand for premium quality and the availability of crop quality improvement methods.

“This is where our solution becomes crucial. It uncovers molecular patterns in the ingredient signature and big data, such as origin, weather, altitude, to generate insights and predictions,” explains Lai. “We offer sellers and buyers an unbiased reference point, expediting existing quality assessment processes — from the farm to the buyers.”

The firm follows a subscription model where clients lease its analyser with access to the modules available on its online platform.

It also provides an AI grading service, where cooperatives and farmers send their crops to the firm for assessment. The reports will be uploaded online (ProfilePrint Hub) much faster and more affordable than existing sensory grading methods.

Driving sustainability

Beyond the immediate operating efficiencies and cost savings, the firm claims it also drives sustainability significantly. Its technology provides traceability features allowing end buyers to access the digital signatures and geographical and harvest records of the ingredient they consume.

Lai believes it alleviates farmer poverty by ensuring that they are paid more fairly based on quality and ultimately providing more transparency and objectivity in the industry.

What are the current challenges? “People, people, people,” Lai replies. “We need more people in the industry seeing the transformative value of digitalising the ingredient supply chain, more people at the farms to benefit from this transformation and more People aligned in skillsets and core values to join our pursuit in this company.”

In February this year, ProfilePrint announced an undisclosed sum in the Series A round. The capital came from food ingredient conglomerates, including Louis Dreyfus Company (Netherlands), Olam Food Ingredients, Sucafina (Switzerland), a Southeast Asian agrifood conglomerate (Indonesia), Greenwillow Capital Management (Singapore) and Real Tech Global Fund (Japan).

That round came a year after the startup secured pre-series A raised from Glocalink Singapore, Leave-a-Nest, and Seeds Capital.

“With some of the world’s largest food ingredient conglomerates as strategic investors, we are now able to leverage their extensive networks to widen and deepen our product offering while ensuring that we maintain our neutrality with the common vision to establish ProfilePrint as the industry’s digital standard for food ingredients globally,” Lai concludes.

This article first appeared in e27