Here’s How AI Can Determine The Taste Of Coffee Beans
Artificial intelligence (AI) is predicted to reach $126 B by 2025. It is showing up in every industry, from healthcare and agriculture to education, finance and shipping. And now, AI has made a move to the food industry to discover and develop new flavors in food and drink.
In 2018, Danish brewer, Carlsburg used AI to map and predict flavors from yeast and other ingredients in beer. IBM developed an AI for McCormick to create better spices. And NotCo, which produces vegan NotMilks, uses AI to analyze molecular structures and find new combinations of plant-based ingredients.
A Colombian startup, Demetria, has raised $3M to date and is betting on its sensory digital fingerprint using AI to match a coffee bean’s profile to the industry’s standard coffee flavor wheel created in 1995.
The new company says that this new sensory digital fingerprint for coffee beans will let roasters and producers assess quality and taste at any stage of the coffee production process.
Felipe Ayerbe, CEO of Demetria, says the wine-a-fication of coffee is here to stay.
“Coffee drinkers today have been exposed and are more aware of the taste and general experience they are looking for and are willing to pay more for that experience,” said Ayerbe. “That is why you see an ever-growing array of possibilities and choices for something that is supposedly a commodity – different prices, origins, roasts, blends, flavor characteristics, preparations — just like wine.”
Ayerbe notes that coffee is still considered a tradable commodity, but the experience that consumers get is anything but a commodity. “In the last 20 years [..], coffee has undergone a voyage of premiumization where the most important variable is sensory quality – taste,” adds Ayerbe.
Ayerbe says this revolution in specialty coffees was spurred in part by industry pioneers like Starbuck and Nespresso that upgraded the world’s taste in coffee.
“With this sensory digital fingerprint, we are upgrading the industry from analog to digital by allowing the full value chain to [..] measure and manage the most important variable in the industry – taste,” said Ayerbe. “We envision that farmers will for the first time not only be able to understand the quality of what they are selling but also manage their farming practices to optimize their quality, creating an unparalleled level of empowerment for them.”
The sensor technology that Demetria uses has existed for 40 years.
“In the past several years, sensors have become miniaturized, more affordable and can connect to the cloud,” said Ayerbe. “This allows for the collection, storage and analysis of huge amounts of data.”
Ayerbe says the company uses handheld near-infra-red (NIR) sensors to read the spectral fingerprint of green coffee beans. This is because the different colors and wavelengths of the light spectrum react differently to each organic compound present in the coffee, representing the whole chemical composition of the beans.
“We then needed AI to translate the NIR data into the sensory language the industry understands,” said Ayerbe. “And, until now, the taste or sensory quality of coffee beans has been determined by cupping, a manual, time-consuming process carried out by the industry’s certified tasting experts, measured according to the industry’s standard coffee tasting wheel,” said Ayerbe.
