From coffee beans to milk, this Singaporean startup uses artificial intelligence to determine the quality of ingredients – NBC Los Angeles

• Using patented digital fingerprint technology, ProfilePrint can quickly analyze the identity and quality of ingredients, helping agribusinesses save money and time.
• A Singaporean tech startup has caught the attention of Japan’s deep tech startup ecosystem.
• ProfilePrint technology has the potential to impact beyond coffee and tea and help improve food security.

There are more mouths to feed in the world than ever before.

As the world’s population grows by approximately 1% annualizeddemand for food increases. But producing more food also has an impact on the environment and potentially reduces its quality.

A Singapore company has developed a new technology aimed at solving this problem.

Using patented digital fingerprint technology, ProfilePrint can quickly analyze the identity and quality of ingredients, helping agribusinesses save money and time.

“If you look at commodity trading today, there is usually a producer, which is the farmers, a group of traders who buy to sell, and then there is an end buyer who buys to produce,” said Alan Lai, CEO. and founder of ProfilePrint, speaking on CNBC’s “CNBC Tech: The Edge.”

The problem, he explained, is the system of repeated exchanges of physical food samples between buyers and sellers, which are repeated at “every link in the supply chain.”

“So the amount of sampling work… is significant,” he said.

“ProfilePrint digitizes food ingredients so that buyers and sellers no longer need to physically deliver samples, allowing us to significantly reduce logistics costs, overhead costs, as well as carbon emissions,” Lai added.

The technology, at first glance, is relatively simple. Companies can create their own artificial intelligence models on the ProfilePrint platform, which can evaluate whether a source ingredient is suitable for what they are looking for. Traders can also create customer-specific AI models to determine whether a product suits their preferences based on criteria such as appearance or taste.

It is based on a detector of waves in materials, combined with artificial intelligence. Machine learning means the technology analyzes food samples at the molecular level and recognizes food quality within seconds.

Lai demonstrated this technology using coffee beans.

“Maybe there’s one or even two beans that accidentally fermented incorrectly, or we have a bug inside the beans that makes the whole bag taste terrible, but if you can’t pick that one or two, then you’re actually not you can sell it in a very meaningful way,” he said.

“So the molecules are captured and converted into a digital fingerprint containing this information.”

At this stage, AI analyzes the fingerprint to formulate a price or solution within seconds by combining industry knowledge.

In addition to predicting quality and flavor profiles, the company’s ingredient quality platform can offer its customers different options when it comes to balancing quality and price.

Powered by proprietary software, PowerPrint technology has led to tremendous progress in solving one of the most challenging problems in the coffee industry; identifying defective products that cannot be seen by the human eye.

The ultimate goal is to optimize the entire supply chain and ultimately eliminate human error.

Profile Print isn’t the only company in the still-nascent pool of food quality and artificial intelligence startups. US startup Aromyx combines biotechnology, data science and artificial intelligence to help companies match tastes and flavors to develop products.

Brightseed, a California-based startup, uses its artificial intelligence platform Forager to identify compounds in plants and microbes and understand their health benefits. These are then used to create health solutions for food, beverages and supplements.

Global inspiration

The startup’s origins date back to 2017, founded during Lai’s travels across the African continent as well as China.

In Uganda, Lai saw farmers trying to sell food ingredients at wholesale prices.

“They haven’t had the experience to judge how good their products are, so they usually only sell at one price, even if the quality is good. If there is a faster way to democratize that experience so that even at the manufacturer level they are able to make better decisions,” he said.

Today, the startup is based in Singapore and 90% of its revenue comes from the city-state. However, with a global market in mind, Lai’s startup is deployed in over 60 locations across six continents, with “digital availability allowing customers to subscribe to our solution anytime, anywhere in the world.”

By 2018, ProfilePrint had attracted the attention of several investors, including Yukihiro Maru, founder and CEO of Leave a Nest Capital, a tech startup ecosystem founded back in 2002 in Japan.

The entrepreneur expanded his company to the ASEAN region and the emerging markets of Southeast Asia.

As a strong proponent of the importance of technology and artificial intelligence in the next generation of tech startups, Maru said ProfilePrint is well positioned to help agribusiness on a global scale.

Speaking to CNBC at the Singapore Innovation and Technology Week conference in October, also known as SWITCH, Maru said he believes ProfilePrint can adapt its technology to markets beyond coffee and tea and enter the food security market.