How do you maximize food production and prevent waste in your supply chain at a time when climate change and a growing global population are placing an increasing strain on resources?
According to Israeli startup Blue Circle, you do it in the same way you protect your technology from hackers: with artificial intelligence, machine learning and huge amounts of data.
This data-led approach, the company says, helps to reduce the approximately 30 percent of food that is wasted worldwide each year along the production chain – a statistic borne out by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The FAO says there are around 870 million on the planet who do not have enough to eat, and reducing the world’s food wastage by just one quarter would end global hunger.
Blue Circle CEO Ilai Englard tells NoCamels that the company aims to build on existing agricultural practices, using sophisticated technology to better help understand the situation on the ground and how the supply chain can be optimized.
“We have a [supply] chain that is extremely complex, and it’s impossible for a human being to understand what’s going on across the network, all the time,” Englard explains.
“We look at the entire value chain from the climate and environment all the way to the consumer and everything in between,” he says. “The harvest and the production and inventory and sales and distribution, all of that – end to end.”
Added to this information is all the scientific research available about a particular crop, including weather and climate data, information about disease and pests, and prices and inventory.
And then, Englard explains, all of this information is fed into the company’s specially built AI platform, which uses it to provide insights into a particular crop. This helps farmers to better understand what is happening on the ground, and whether the multitude of factors that go into crop production are all on track.
The Tel Aviv-based company was founded in 2018, with backing from venture capitalists and private investors. And with such a forensic approach to the food production process, it is no surprise that the creators have defense tech experience, coming from the Israel Defense Forces’ renowned signal intelligence unit 8200.
This deep experience of digital processes and the holistic focus on the food supply chain are what sets Blue Circle apart, Englard says, rather than concentrating on individual issues such as irrigation or pest control like many other companies in the field.
“The chain is very, very complex,” he says. “So you have to understand – in order to really make an impact, you need to understand the entire chain.”
Englard gives the example of the wine industry, whose long years of meticulous record keeping makes it “ideal” for the data-conscious Blue Circle platform.
“This industry has decades of very rich data,” he says. ”They know exactly what happened in the vineyards and what they planted; how they treated each and every vineyard over the years and when they harvested and what the grape profile was.”
This data-focused method covers every stage of the wine growing process, which he says will allow Blue Circle to help increase the flexibility across the entire production chain, allowing wineries to improve efficiency, quality and profitability, while also conserving resources.
He cites the example of wineries in Napa Valley, an area of California famed for its vineyards, where a period of little rain and slightly lowered temperatures led the platform to predict a longer growing season, which in turn meant an increased risk of yield loss due to disease. This allowed the wineries to be ready for these outcomes.
The company works with a number of vineyards in Israel and abroad, including some of the largest wineries in the world, as they manage current and prepare for future challenges due to climate change. And it wants to expand its reach across the food production world.
“The basic intelligence for our system is something that we want to make accessible to everyone – this is our vision,” Englard says.
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