Roastpic: A revolution in coffee quality assurance
Emmerich, Germany, March 14, 2024: Roastpic, a new technology spin-off from the University of California, Davis, has partnered with PROBAT subsidiary and cloud service provider Fabscale to offer seamless data integration through simple photography. The Roastpic imaging and analysis tool allows users to compare color, size, and defect count of different coffee batches (green, roasted or ground) and make data-driven decisions for intelligent quality control. Roastpic will be presented for the first time at the PROBAT booth at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Chicago, April 12-14.
Professionals across the global coffee sector care deeply about size, color, and defects in their coffee, but measuring them is expensive and tedious. To address this problem, two Q-certified computer science students in the Coffee Center at UC Davis developed the core Roastpic image analysis software, that makes coffee quality control as easy as possible: Simply place your beans (green, roasted or ground) on the Roastpic Photosheet, snap a photo, and view your data. The subscription-based Roastpic app is available in three different tiers to meet the individual quality control needs of the specialty and commodity coffee sector. It provides reliable and unlimited data that can be stored in the cloud.
"Quality control needs to be done at so many steps along the coffee supply chain, and the current methods are cumbersome and costly," explains William Ristenpart, CEO of Roastpic and founding director of the Coffee Center at UC Davis. "Half of specialty coffee roasters don't do quantitative color analysis because it’s so expensive. Besides, it takes about 20 minutes to identify defects in each batch of green coffee. With Roastpic and its built-in machine learning algorithms, you get so much data from just one photo," he concludes.
Roastpic Free, the free tier, and Roastpic Premium, the first paid tier, are for specialty roasters who take pictures with their smartphone. Roastpic Professional, the third tier developed with and offered by Fabscale, is for large roasting companies that require the highest level of quality assurance and verification.
"Roastpic Professional comes with an industrial multi-user photo station, the Coffee Vision System, with a built-in camera for seamless integration with the Fabscale application, where the captured data is linked in real time with other shop floor data collected and analyzed in the roastery to provide statistics on new and past roasts," says Gökhan Adamhanoglu, General Manager of Fabscale, explaining the third level of Roastpic. "Each piece of color, size and defect data collected by the Coffee Vision System can be viewed in detail with a simple click through the Fabscale application on a desktop or mobile device. We look forward to giving visitors to the Chicago show a sneak preview of Roastpic Professional, which is expected to be released in the third quarter of this year," he concludes.
With Roastpic, roasters can ensure that their coffee beans meet the highest industry standards while streamlining their quality control processes.
Meet Roastpic and Fabscale at the PROBAT booth #2045 at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Chicago.
For more information and to download the free Roastpic app and free Photosheet, visit www.roastpic.com
For more information about Roastpic Professional, visit www.fabscale.com/features-roastpic
About Roastpic:
Roastpic is a technology company made up entirely of students and professors from the Coffee Center at the University of California Davis. In 2022, two Q-certified computer science students with a deep passion for coffee joined the Coffee Center and began a project to use mobile phones and computer vision to obtain high-quality data about coffee. The result is Roastpic: an app explicitly designed to provide the coffee industry with hard data about coffee at a fraction of the cost of current methods.
About Fabscale:
Fabscale, a joint venture between PROBAT and software solutions provider CROPSTER, reduces the complexity of data management by merging and analyzing data and presenting simple and actionable management tools for your roaster and your plant. The Fabscale application is vendor-independent and can be used with any roasting machine and plant technology.