Tesco trials avocado ripeness scanners

bbc.com

7 points·dabinat··4 comments

These seem to be from a company OneThird: https://onethird.io/avocado-scanner

From their website on how it works:

"Every piece of fresh produce has a unique spectral fingerprint. We have collected a vast amount of spectral data for many different varieties and maturity levels. Our system combines this with other data sources and uses AI algorithms to analyze the data and determine what the expected shelf-life is."

So basically, it just looks at the colour. And "AI" because it's 2025.

RGB is a pretty coarse and narrow sampling of the visible + adjacent light spectrum. Sometimes, using the right wavelength(s) is surprisingly revealing. Unclear if that is the case here - an RGB camera must be by far the cheapest way to get a "spectrum".

That cannot possibly work. Color isn't anywhere close to a reliable predictor of ripeness. If it were people wouldn't have to squeeze-test them. Different sub-varieties have different skin colors. Two avocadoes with identical colors (even of the same variety) can have wildly different ripeness levels, and an individual avocado won't change color consistently as it ripens.

A bin has avocadoes from different farms, and therefore different sub-varieties. They'll all be Hass, but not clones of the same tree. So you can't even just program in that these avocadoes came from X location.

They claim to have success so perhaps they've got something else going on.

It does seem like a gimmick to create a tool for something pretty easy to do yourself, but I could see it being useful when someone else is going to the store on your behalf. So you could just put “Avocados, #3 ripeness” on an Instacart order and get exactly what you want.

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