STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 41 YOUR CERTIFIED COFFEE MEETS OUR CERTIFIED FILTER PAPER Glatfelter DYNAGREEN ® uses compostable and GMO free certified polymers for your single serve coffee product portfolio. All our filter papers, are manufactured with renewable fibers such as Abaca, cellulose and wood pulp. Our wood based materials are available as FSC® certified (FSC® C041205). Choosing Glatfelter DYNAGREEN® for your hard pods, soft pads, bags, pouches, capsules and meet your sustainability goals. For any inquiries, please contact sales@glatfelter.com glatfelter.com As an avid tea drinker, ProfilePrint CEO Alan Lai was keen to apply his company's technology to the challenging task of evaluating Camellia sinensis. Photo courtesy ProfilePrint print" that estimates the chemical and taste profile of a product sample. Yet the process is about as difficult as making toast. The tea grower just needs to pop a tablespoon of leaves into the drawer of the countertop analyzer, which is about the size of a K-pod coffee brewing machine. Close the draw and wait a few seconds for the analyzer to use sensors to record raw test data. That information gets uploaded to the cloud and analyzed by the company's software. The tea or coffee seller can then access the completed product profile online by smart phone or laptop and send it to a buyer anywhere in the world. "What we saw was a lot of inefficiencies in the current sup- ply chain," Lai said. "Growers, whenever they produce good quality products, are not typically getting a price based on qual- ity, but often based on quantity. This enables middlemen to up the price and earn quite good money from consumers. "ProfilePrint is a better way to assess quality — firstly, more objectively, and secondly, more rapidly since you do not have to send it to a lab. It's not difficult to operate. We in- crease efficiency without removing the value added by middle- men," Lai explained. The technology doesn't make tasters redundant. A buyer, after using the digital profiles to screen out supplies that score low on the desired characteristics, still needs to conduct proto- coled tasting of qualified samples. Tasters complete the process by scoring taste, aroma, color, clarity, mouthfeel, and other or- ganoleptic — a.k.a. sensory — properties. Lai said that ProfilePrint is initially applying its technology for use in the supply chains of a handful of major commodi- ties and ingredients that are prone to counterfeiting and scams: tea, coffee, cocoa, rice, other grains, spices, and traditional Chinese medicine. Lai, an aeronautical engineer by training, spent his early career in the United Kingdom, China, and Singapore in merg- ers and acquisitions, private equity, and venture capital. As a daily drinker of tea, Lai recognized that repeatedly sampling

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