Press Releases

AgShift announces commercial launch of Hydra F100 BQ – world’s first AI enabled food quality analyser

March 1, 2019

Posted by: Anasia D'mello

Miku Jha of AgShift

AgShift, a Silicon Valley, California based food technology startup specialising in Deep Learning and machine vision announced the commercial launch of Hydra F100 BQ, which is claimed to be world’s first AI based turnkey food quality analyser.

Announcing the successful launch of Hydra F100 BQ, Miku Jha, the founder and CEO of AgShift said, “This was a much-needed innovation in food quality assessment. The current food quality assessment processes are paper-based and manual, many times leading to inconsistent and subjective outcomes that result in losses in the range of $15 (€13.1) to $16 billion (€14) billion annually, not accounting for millions of dollars lost in recovery costs, claim management and diluted brand equity for the organisations involved. ”

She continued, “Add to that the human fatigue of inspectors doing high volume of inspections on a daily basis. Hydra F100 BQ is a powerful objective tool to augment food inspectors. It also enables brands to enforce consistency in food quality.”

Hydra F100 BQ has been designed and developed to offer a completely unbiased and objective assessment of commodities protecting the quality, sourcing, pricing and brand, every single time. Having completely digitised and automated the inspection process, it significantly reduces errors and inconsistencies in terms of judgment, and also makes the inspection process audit-ready.

Hydra F100 BQ is a state-of-the-art turn-key analyser integrated with patented deep learning and computer vision techniques to analyse and grade the quality of commodities. It comes with a built-in lightweight, easy-to-use touch-based software application which has provision for features like weight analysis, size analysis, bar code scanning, color analysis among other advanced features supporting easy discovery of defects and auto-grading of the commodities as a whole. This integration enables the food inspectors to achieve 10x operational efficiencies during the inspection process.

“What helped us in this journey was our razor-sharp mission – Bringing autonomy in the food inspection process so as to introduce objectivity and consistency and minimise operational inefficiencies,” Miku added.

And the focus has indeed helped AgShift tremendously. In the ongoing commercial trials, Hydra F100 BQ has achieved high levels of prediction accuracies in inspection of commodities like strawberries and cashews. Miku adds, “We have been fortunate to have ongoing commercial trials with leading food organisations like Driscoll‘s for strawberry inspection and Olam for cashew inspections.”

“The level of support and collaboration which we are receiving from our trial customers has been overwhelming. Their openness to technology adoption is encouraging for young companies like AgShift who are on a mission to tackle complex, global challenges facing the food ecosystem.”

Talking about the larger vision of the company, Miku said, “We are committed to closing the gap between food and technology. The food industry is prime for innovation, specifically in the field of automation. Our solutions are bringing much needed operational efficiencies and objective accuracies enabling a different kind of quality transparency across the entire food supply chain.”

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