INDIA - Amazon is continuing to blaze its own path into the world of produce with the help of technology. Recently, the e-commerce giant announced it is building a computer vision-based grading solution for food products. With this latest technological advancement, Amazon would be able to utilize a machine learning-based approach to analyze produce images for imperfections such as cuts, cracks, and pressure damage.

“Quality is one of the key drivers of fruit and vegetable purchasing decisions and a critical factor in achieving customer satisfaction,” said Rajeev Rastogi, Amazon India's Vice President of Machine Learning, at the company’s Smbhav 2021 event. “Having humans grade the quality of fruits and vegetables by manually examining each individual piece of produce like tomato or onion is not scalable to millions of quality assessments per day.”

According to Business Standard, Amazon plans to develop a conveyor belt-based automatic grading and packing machine. It would leverage hardware and machine learning to pack produce into predetermined quality grades such as premium-grade A. The gradient pack machine will reduce grading costs by 78 percent compared to manual grading.

In addition, Amazon plans to use near-infrared sensors to detect attributes such as sweetness and ripeness. The news source continued to note these attributes cannot be detected in RGB (red, green, blue) images captured by traditional computer vision algorithms and require deeper methods such as eating the fruit.

To learn more, be sure to read Business Standard's full report.

How far will technology continue to take us to get the freshest produce possible from farm to shelf to plate? It is not yet known how Amazon's new technology will bear down upon the suppliers, but keep checking back to ANUK as we bring the latest.

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