AI tool for soft fruit growers comes to market

A new digital forecasting tool to maximize planning and profitability for soft fruit growers has secured £2.8m in investment.

FruitCast, which has been trialled on leading soft fruit farms in the UK over the last two years, will launch in 2024 thanks to the capital raised from private investors, Ceres Agritech and Innovate UK through its investor partnership programme.

The startup has been created in response to the demand from growers to more precisely forecast fruit growth development to help plan labour and market supply and protect margins.

“The AI capability is driven by one of the largest databases in the world, which gives it a firm foundation for accurate forecasting ahead of other competitors,” said FruitCast CEO Richard Williamson. “This combined with the depth of understanding of practical agriculture and proven capability has made FruitCast attractive to agritech investors in what is a competitive and noisy marketplace.”

Traditionally yield forecasting is based on skilled workers counting plants and multiplying up to predict quantity and harvest dates.

FruitCast uses a moving camera to take thousands of photographs to measure individual fruit numbers, weight and the maturity of millions of berries per day.

Chief technical officer, Dr Raymond Martin, developed FruitCast on the back of his PhD on optimizing soft fruit processes, when growers asked him not to leave his research on the shelf. He said yield forecasting is the holy grail for soft fruit growers.

“It’s a time sensitive crop, and too much fruit in any week means waste and loss, and too little, you lose business,” he said. “We’re delighted to have attracted the funding and industry support to bring FruitCast to launch. “We want all growers to be able to precisely forecast their season to give them the leverage to take back the power in managing their costs and customer contracts.”

The technology, which delivers predictions back through a user-friendly interface so production managers can allocate labour and market sales for up to six weeks in advance, is being trialled at field-scale with two of the UK’s leading soft fruit growers and processors, W B Chambers and Place UK.

An initial £520,000 in funding in 2022 came from Ceres Agritech, which finances commercial agri-tech projects from its university partners. This allowed FruitCast to develop the tool and build a team of research scientists and industry experts. Recent investment of over £1.1m to take Fruitcast to launch has come again from Ceres Agritech and Innovate UK in addition to private investors.

FruitCast will be a subscription system. Development will continue over the next six months to become commercially available for early-access in the 2024 growing season, with the opportunity to build on it for other crops including other soft-fruits, top-fruit, brassicas and salads.

Read the JUNE/JULY 2023 issue of New AG International, free to view here.