AFN – Cargill recently joined a list of high-profile corporate investors in Singapore food grading startup ProfilePrint, contributing an undisclosed sum to the latter’s recent Series A1 round.
ProfilePrint’s patented AI-based platform can digitally grade food ingredients, greatly speeding up the quality assurance process for food manufacturers and retailers up and down the supply chain.
Netherlands-based Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), Singapore agribusiness corporate Olam International, international coffee merchant Sucafina and Indonesia’s Sinar Mas contributed to ProfilePrint’s Series A round that closed earlier this year.
“They were all clients to begin with,” ProfilePrint founder and CEO Alan Lai says of the company’s corporate investors. Eventually, those companies decided to “invest collectively” in what became the Series A round.
How it works:
ProfilePrint’s “digital fingerprint” technology can make on-the-spot assessments of different food ingredients — coffee, cocoa or rice, for example — and grade them for quality far faster than traditional methods.
The company’s portable scanner lets those in the supply chain, like manufacturers and retailers, digitally assess the quality and authenticity of ingredients via a small sample inserted into the scanner.
The process, which only takes a few seconds, involves electromagnetic scanning of the ingredients, which are then scored for quality; the results are posted online where buyers and sellers can access them remotely.
Testing samples via ProfilePrint’s device can save food companies weeks, since no sample has to be sent to a lab for inspection. ProfilePrint is currently in 26 cities of the world that includes all five continents from Africa to America, China, Southeast Asia. ProfilePrint’s system currently works for tea, coffee, grains and oilseeds, cocoa, herbs and spices, liquids, food additives and dairy products. Cargill has completed pilots with ProfilePrint and says it has validated the application of the latter’s technology across its ingredients portfolio.
