AgroFresh Solutions, a post-harvest produce freshness and quality solutions provider, said it has collaborated with Rubens Technologies and Escavox to enhance its FreshCloud digital platform. FreshCloud is a comprehensive data-backed solution that empowers the produce supply chain to make real-time decisions.
AgroFresh said these collaborations will help users leverage FreshCloud’s analytics, monitoring tools and data to extend freshness and reduce food waste from farm to shelf.
Fruit quality detection
At IFPA’s Global Produce and Floral Show, Bradford Warner, AgroFresh global head of digital and data and Daniel Pelliccia, founder and CEO of Rubens Technologies, gave The Packer readers a quick preview of the collaboration.
FreshCloud Harvest now integrates data from Rubens Technologies’ hand-held spectral scanner that enables growers to quickly and easily collect fruit quality indicators to help them predict the optimal time for picking and assess fruit quality, without damaging the produce. Rubens Technologies spectral sensing combined with proprietary algorithms measures brix, firmness and starch in apples.
Warner said the collaboration with Rubens Technologies will help users become more efficient in the field and in the packinghouse. He said paring the sensing technology from Rubens Technologies and the FreshCloud data from AgroFresh will help growers understand when and where to harvest, especially on varieties that might be more inclined to spot-picking or with trees where there is ripeness variation between the internal and external part of a canopy.
Warner also said this technology will greatly improve upon the tried-and-true starch test, which can have wide variability in results.
“This is going to turn into the calibration of timing that harvest even better,” Warner told The Packer. “When you can use harvest now, you can flatten the curve a bit of when you have to harvest and your labor costs can be greatly regularized. So not only are you timing the harvest to the optimum, but your yield off those trees is going to be exceptional.”
Pelliccia said the scanner reads the produce’s chlorophyll, carotenoids and flavonoids to help growers understand the maturity of the fruit. He said the company has started to use the spectral scanner in stone fruit, avocados, kiwi fruit and more and growers will have the option to select different fruit to scan in the FreshCloud app.
“The deep-learning-based calibrations that we developed, they are the ones that translate the data that this device will capture to the data that the customers actually would like to know — the sugar content or the maturity level,” he told The Packer.
Warner said, too, the hope in the future is to take the data from FreshCloud Harvest and create machine learning capabilities to help growers better analyze historical data and data from that growing season to better understand what and where things occur within an orchard.
“We imagine being able to go to an interface maybe a year from now, where you could actually ask questions and start to use something like a large language model like we will be building to say, ‘I’m surprised at the quality I’m seeing in these blocks versus if I looked at the quality scores for that grower last year, what does that tell me?’” Warner told The Packer.
Transit monitoring
Escavox is a comprehensive monitoring solution that captures and reports on multiple layers of produce and shipping data while the product is in transit. Using the FreshCloud Transit module, users can receive actionable insights from the Escavox technology to improve the quality and efficiency of fresh food logistics, including calculating predictive shelf life for best use, less rejection and reduced waste.
“Harvest quality, minus the impact of the journey, equals consumer quality,” Luke Wood, Founder and CEO of Escavox, said in the release. “We take a unique approach with a focus on the food, not the assets that move it. By blending quality and commercial metrics into one place, we can expose problems and opportunities other solutions cannot see, let alone optimize. By using data to eradicate waste related to transit, everyone wins.”
AgroFresh said Escavox captures near real-time product and shipping conditions through autonomous Escavox Blue Box Trackers, delivering immediate insights into product conditions. The data provided empowers stakeholders with actionable insights through intuitive dashboards that reveal inefficiencies and support data-driven decisions to improve supply chain performance. Automated reporting streamlines tracking and analysis, with the end goal of reducing waste.
“With the addition of Rubens Technologies and Escavox solutions, the FreshCloud digital ecosystem is now informed by near real-time data at each crucial step in the produce supply chain: at the grower, in production, in storage, at retail distribution and during transit,” Warner said in the release. “These collaborations enable FreshCloud to provide a fully integrated monitoring system, empowering growers, packers, marketers and shippers to make critical business decisions to improve fruit quality and profitability.”
