Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/1483499
40 STiR coffee and tea | 2022 Issue 5 (October/November) By Dan Bolton A s the global tide of Covid-19 recedes, what remains is a world of digitalization. And it's not just Zoom. In the vast business of sourcing food ingredi- ents, the pandemic exposed a major weak link in supply chain operations — the need to continually sample products like coffee, tea, cocoa, herbs and spices, and grain. Buyers need to obtain physical samples of these goods in order to conduct chemical tests and taste tests. And the buyer often has to or- der and screen many different samples in order to find a supply meeting very narrow, very specific characteristics. Authentication, chemical analysis, tasting, etc. The process is complex, time-consuming, er- ror-prone, and expensive, especially the final step of protocoled tasting by highly paid experts. The pandemic made the process even more difficult and expensive, due to bottlenecks and barriers in cargo transport and travel. Digitalization looks like an increasingly ready remedy, particularly the new artificial intelligence and sensor technologies being developed by re- searchers and entrepreneurs. Will AI revolutionize the global sourcing of tea and coffee? Five giant companies have bet that a startup's technology will. Tea Sampling Takes a Dip Into Digitalization Operating on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, Prof- ilePrint's technology gives the coffee and tea industries a fast way to screen the chemical and sensory qualities of samples without lab tests or tasting. One leading example is ProfilePrint, a Singa- pore-based startup established in 2017. In August, it won a major strategic investment from agribusi- ness giant Cargill following successful results of six months of pilot projects that validated ProfilePrint's technology across a portfolio of ingredients. The company had already attracted invest- ments from top venture capital funds, the Singa- pore government and several strategic corporate investors in the tea, coffee, agribusiness, and food ingredient sectors: Netherland-based Louis Drey- fus Company, Singapore-headquartered Olam In- ternational, Swiss coffee merchant Sucafina, and Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas. ProfilePrint's algorithm can rapidly authen- ticate a product, identify adulteration, and even predict the characteristics of blends using sensor technology and chemometrics, the science of us- ing data to measure chemicals. "ProfilePrint is on a mission to transform food ingredient supply chains globally," said Alan Lai, ProfilePrint's founder and CEO. The company uses its own patented artificial intelligence to re- cord complex, interrelated parameters, and sen- sory data, combining them into a single "finger- Courtesy ProfilePrint