OneThird's industry-first, AI-powered platform combines a full set of quality control parameters within the fresh produce supply chain to save labor costs and significantly reduce food waste
ENSCHEDE, The Netherlands, Feb. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- OneThird, an AI-driven food tech innovator tackling the $1 trillion annual food waste crisis, today announced it is expanding its AI-powered platform to empower stakeholders along the fresh produce supply chain with an industry-first, digital quality control (QC) platform that saves labor cost and significantly reduces produce waste. The announcement expands the usage of OneThird's AI-powered near-infrared (NIR) technology to support analysis of brix and dry matter, visual defects, shelf life and ripeness of a growing catalog of fruits, including avocados, blueberries, strawberries and tomatoes. OneThird's technology saves time, is non-destructive and provides superior insights for growers, distributors and retailers. View a short video about OneThird here.
Helping stakeholders optimize customer allocation decisions, shipping routes, best-before dates, and surplus produce repurposing, OneThird offers a powerful solution to one of the world's most pressing challenges and aligns directly with global sustainability goals. Up to one-third of the food brought to market annually is wasted at an estimated cost of $1 trillion (€960Bn or £805Bn), and almost half of it – 40% – is fresh produce. OneThird's technology has been shown to reduce waste by up to 25%.
Conventional QC in the fresh produce supply chain is labor and time-intensive, mostly analog and causes unnecessary food waste. Current tests are also still highly subjective and inaccurate. Quality control staff across the supply chain rely on visual inspection to determine defects and shelf life. Brix tests, which measure the amount of sugar in produce, require staff to squeeze juice from berries or fruits manually, which is susceptible to errors that may influence critical quality decisions and result in rejection further down the supply chain — wasting produce and time. Dry matter tests of avocados take up to 12 hours in ovens, while shelf-life tests can take days. OneThird's new digital quality control platform changes the status quo with the use of AI by providing these parameters in real time.
"OneThird is already successfully implementing its unique shelf-life prediction solution in the fresh supply chain," said Henrike Langbroek, CEO of OneThird. "Expanding our technology to fulfill all quality control requirements addresses a key pain point for our customers. It makes the job of quality inspectors much easier and provides faster feedback to the commercial teams to direct the right products to the right place, reducing produce waste."
How OneThird's QC Platform Works.
Take an image of a batch of produce and scan it with the OneThird scanner app. The AI-driven algorithms then determine multiple visual quality parameters in real time. Additionally, the non-destructive NIR scanner technology provides valuable insights about the internal quality of produce, resulting in shelf life prediction and brix- and dry matter assessments – without harming the tested produce.
QC staff can use OneThird's scanners to evaluate traditional and advanced QC parameters and receive AI-powered insights and trend information in a few seconds, which are shared instantly with stakeholders. The data and trend insights empower growers, distributors and retailers to make smarter decisions along the supply chain and prevent up to 25% of food waste by optimizing best-before dates, shipping routes and repurposing surplus produce. OneThird drastically reduces the manual labor required and results in immediate savings of up to 50% in QC labor costs by streamlining how QC data is acquired and cataloged.
"The industry has long relied on destructive and subjective brix testing of berries and very laborious dry matter testing of avocados," explained Marco Snikkers, founder of OneThird. "Seeing there is a faster way is often eye-opening. Access to real-time data ensures growers and distributors are confident they are delivering the right quality to their customers, along with significant cost and time savings."
About OneThird
OneThird is on a mission to address a $1 trillion annual problem — reducing the loss of one-third of all food produced worldwide. OneThird's food tech solutions for growers, distributors and grocery retailers allow for high-accuracy shelf life prediction of produce at any stage of the supply chain — ensuring the right product gets to the right place at the right time. Using passion and creativity, OneThird delivers impactful solutions to reduce food waste, lower CO2 emissions and water usage associated with wasted produce, and drive significant cost savings for customers.
Founded in 2019 and based in Enschede, The Netherlands, OneThird is a privately held company backed by impact investors Invest International, Pymwymic, Halma Ventures Limited, SHIFT Invest, and Oost NL. Access the OneThird press kit here, follow OneThird on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram or learn more at https://onethird.io.
Media Contact
Mindy M. Hull, Mercury Global Partners for OneThird, 1 415 889 9977, [email protected], https://onethird.io
Michael Held-Hernandez, Mercury Global Partners for OneThird, 1 480 306 1154, [email protected], https://onthird.io
SOURCE Mercury Global Partners for OneThird
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