Something that requires a bit of explanation to most people we speak to is why the matchmaking. Some of you may have noticed from our website that we claim to be a company focused on quality in agriculture, specifically the quality of high value, highly perishable fresh horticultural produce. We also claim that we are using AI to build automated grading solutions that farmers and market sellers can use to help standardise quality and grading standards in their operations.
Yet if you sign up and start using our app you will see our platform currently looks more like a matchmaking platform. A platform where farmers and buyers list the crops they are selling and seeking to procure respectively to attract each other.
Controlling and managing quality is vital in fresh produce supply chains. Quality significantly impacts shelf life, price and the ultimate nutritional benefit to the end consumer. Buyers are generally acutely aware of the importance of quality yet many farmers remain ignorant or are only partially aware to its importance. This is not a failing of the buyer or the farmer but rather the lack of an appropriate communication portal to convey the nuance and specifics of grading fresh produce.
We founded Kuronga because we realised that there is a market for every grade of produce. However, to access these markets farmers needed to improve their on-farm grading to cater for different market grading standards. That is what Kuronga does. It helps farmers begin to understand the importance of on-farm grading, how to execute it effectively and subsequently target different grades to the appropriate market. Buyers also get real world benefit as they can specifically communicate grading requirements on a dedicated platform that clearly shows their suppliers what they need and expect from them.
So how do we turn user interaction into AI that can help automate grading. The answer is images. The Kuronga platform is an image centric communication portal. Farmers and buyers use images to convey crop quality they produce or seek to procure respectively. What is more buyers on the platform can leave farmers feedback on their production quality. This instantly starts to improve the communication of quality requirements between buyers and farmers.
So why matchmaking? Firstly its pragmatic, users can begin improving communication of quality standards immediately without the initial need for an AI solution. Secondly, our image centric platform has been designed from the ground up with image labelling in mind. We are using the knowledge of our users to help train our AI. The outcome will be an AI with the collective wisdom of all buyers interacting on the platform that can be deployed at the farm gate of all our farmers. By analysing this image centric communication on quality standards we can begin to build AI tools that enable automated grading of fresh produce using just a smartphone and an internet connection.
Still have questions feel free to contact us
Are you a farmer wanting to learn how to access different markets by enhancing your on-farm grading capabilities? Sign up now and get listing.
Are you a buyer looking for more reliable suppliers or maybe just looking for an easier way to standardise the grading of your existing suppliers? Sign up now to list your procurement quality requirements and provide your suppliers with grading feedback.
You can also check out our how to guides to learn more about using our platform.