This tech startup wants to use deep learning to reduce food waste

AgShift, a technology startup building the first ever autonomous food inspection system, has raised $2 million seed funding from India’s Exfinity Ventures and other companies. The purpose of the fundraising was to bolster product development and reach more customers, to help the startup pursue its mission of reducing global food waste.

“Current food inspection processes are paper-based and tedious, needing continuous personal training. Inconsistent & subjective inspections result in a loss of $15.6 billion a year for the organizations responsible — not counting the millions of dollars in recovery costs, claim management and loss of brand reputation incurred by the companies involved,” said AgShift founder and CEO Miku Jha. “At AgShift, we are re-imagining food inspection at various layers — starting from digitizing product specifications, using a mobile-first approach for operational efficiencies to leveraging Deep Learning to make inspections autonomous. Our goal is to standardize food inspection across the entire supply chain and reduce food wastage resulting from inconsistencies in food quality interpretation.”

Using Deep Learning with Computer Vision, AgShift inspects produce for defects, assessing its quality and deciding whether food meets USDA specifications. According to the company, the deep learning models learn to analyze defects with consistency and accuracy, having examined extensive real-world image data to determine and predict the overall quality of a product. By reducing the need for manual inspection of produce quality, the technology can reduce labor costs and ensure standardized quality levels across the board. The food inspection system can also help encourage higher quality of food around the world, thus helping to reduce food waste domestically and internationally.

“We have just begun to see the capabilities that this technology can bring to the food industry. AgShift can make a huge impact on reducing 1.3 Billion tons of annual food loss and waste — a complex, real world challenge for everyone,” said Miku Jha.

Exfinity Ventures was among the companies that financially backed AgShift. “The AgShift team is truly leading the transition of food inspection and quality assessment into the data-driven era, AgShift’s unique application of deep learning with a challenging proposition truly excites us,” said Shailesh Ghorpade, managing partner and CIO of Exfinity Ventures.