This article was first published by The Times of Israel and was re-posted with permission.
Israeli startup AclarTech has developed a mobile app that allows to monitor, in real time, the ripeness, freshness and quality of fruits and vegetables.
The Ness Ziona, Israel-based firm’s AclaroMeter will change the way farmers make their decisions and will “revolutionize” the global food market by helping prevent wasted products and making them accessible to wider populations, the company says on its website.
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Today, farmers decide when to pick fruit based on instinct or lab tests. “These methods are extremely inefficient and not standardized, leading to a yearly loss of approximately 50% of worldwide grown fruit” and vegetables, the company said, with some wasted even before it gets to consumers’ homes.
With the Aclaro meter, users scan the fruit with their built-in smartphone camera and with a standard portable molecular sensor, the SCIO.
This captures a large set of measurements about the fruit and its environment, revealing data like the fruit’s sugar content, acidity, firmness, weight and color, as well as its GPS location and weather conditions at the time of sampling. The data is then uploaded to the cloud and is processed by a tailor-made algorithm that compares the data to tens of thousands of other samples of previously inspected fruit.
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SubscribeThe algorithm then grades the scanned fruit for freshness, ripeness and quality within a few seconds, the company said. This data can help farmers decide when to pick their produce and monitor its freshness as it moves along the food chain via packaging houses to retailers and end users.
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AclarTech has just completed a pilot project with a local grape producer and is set to start a beta test with agricultural entities in Israel, including the Agriculture Ministry, the Plant Council, the agricultural research organization Volcani Center and wineries.
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Photos: Courtesy
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