The battleground for retail dominance in the fresh produce industry has officially moved inside the fruit. For decades, packers and shippers have relied on external, visual inspections to grade their product, leaving the internal quality a mystery until a consumer slices it open — or a retailer issues a costly quality claim.
Enter Orbem, a German tech company that originally made its mark far from the produce aisle. Having recently secured €55.5 million in Series B funding, the company has established a U.S. headquarters in Houston.
“We found that it’s a very good place in the U.S. to get around to the rest of the U.S., so it’s been good for us so far,” says Pedro Gomez, CEO of Orbem.
While the technology is new to the fruit sector, the underlying platform is already heavily commercialized.
“We actually come from the world of poultry, where we have large-scale commercial deployments, and currently today we already have an installed base here in the U.S.,” Gomez says. “We’ve scanned more than 200 million eggs since we launched, and it’s been pretty interesting, because we see that the system we work with AI technology ... is improving over time, the more we scan.”
Now, Orbem is shifting its focus to the biological unpredictability of fresh produce, targeting watermelons and avocados as its primary entry points.
Adapting to the Unpredictability of Nature
Moving from the uniform shape of poultry eggs to the highly variable world of fresh produce presents unique engineering hurdles. But according to Gomez, that variability is exactly where the opportunity lies.
“We partner with established automation companies, because handling an egg, handling an avocado or handling a watermelon is a comparable task, but it’s not identical. You need to be able to, on the automation equipment side of things, deal with these different sizes and shapes, so that they can pass through the machine.”
Once inside the system, the fruit enters a specialized scanner using technology adapted directly from medical health care.
“We work with technology that comes originally from the hospital, so this is MRI technology, but this is an industrial version of the hospital-grade MRI technology, and that - in a very fast amount of time - enables us to see everything from the skin to the core, and we create a very fine high-resolution image of what we’re seeing,” Gomez says.
To keep high-volume packing lines moving without bottlenecks, Orbem calibrated the system to scan for the worst-case scenario.
“Imagine we’re always creating an image for the largest possible watermelon, and then the watermelon is smaller, we’re going to see a smaller watermelon, but we’re always acquiring data for the largest possible,” Gomez says. “So it wouldn’t change what we offer to our customers.”
The Physical Flow: From Scan to Sort
For packers wondering how this fits into a bustling facility, Gomez breaks the process down into three key steps:
- The Line Movement: “The first one is the automation equipment. We are moving produce from A to B. It’s just conveyor belts and lines moving the produce.”
- The Big Tube: “As we move the produce through our system, it goes into a big tube, and there we are acquiring information.”
- The AI Decision: “This data gets sent to a computer that is also installed onsite, and the computer, based on what it’s seen in the past, based on information it already has, can make a decision.”
From there, the system seamlessly triggers mechanical sorting gates.
“This computer then relays the information to automation equipment, which would be the final step of the process to do automatic grading or quality sorting.”
The parameters aren’t locked in by tech developers, either. Gomez notes “the level and the grades of the quality are set directly by the producer.”
Shifting the Bottom Line
Orbem is launching this technology with an operational expense (OpEx) financial model rather than demanding a massive capital investment up front.
“We normally work directly with packers, so the packers are the ones making the investment decision,” Gomez says. “This investment decision tends to be more of an operational expense. That means that there will be a marginal fee per scan pound of fresh produce, and they can get up and running.”
The ultimate goal is transparency, giving packers the ability to tier their pricing based on verified internal quality and significantly reduce shrinkage.
“I’m always mindful to say we can reduce rejection rates to 0% because you know, you want yield, you need to have certain rejection rates, but at least you know what’s inside the produce, and you can start charging as a function of quality,” Gomez says. “If a provider, starting with a producer, if they can prove what’s inside of every single box, the producer might even start being able to create a differentiated brand.”
When Will It Hit the U.S.?
While Orbem’s first commercial watermelon scanner just went live in Spain with producer JimboFresh, U.S. packers will have to wait just a bit longer to see the machinery running on domestic soil.
“The current fruits that are being shipped are not using this technology; our European customers use it for European production,” Gomez says. “There are no places in the U.S. that are using this technology yet.”
However, the U.S. timeline is fast approaching.
“In early 2027, we should have the first deployments, and then as a function of how they see the quality that is coming out of the system ... I expect then the larger uptake in late 2027 and more throughout 2028.”
For Gomez, who grew up in the Northeast of Mexico, bringing this level of transparency to the avocado and fresh produce supply chain is personal.
“We’re not going to solve every single problem, but hopefully we can bring more transparency to the industry and enable retailers, growers and packers to make better decisions with this increased transparency,” he says.
