Felix Instruments collaborates with specialists of fruit sector to prove effectiveness of newly updated Kiwifruit Quality Meter

Felix Instruments - Applied Food Science, a subsidiary of CID Bio-Science, Inc., develops and manufactures NIR assessment and gas analysis tools for growers, breeders and distributors to obtain critical data from fruit quickly and non-destructively. 

Their portable NIR spectrometers are capable of measuring dry matter, Brix, and titratable acidity, in addition to external and internal color of fruits. 

In the past year, the engineers of Felix Instruments have worked hard to design a new firmware update that would produce a marked improvement over previous versions of their instruments. With that firmware update came the ability to customize the user’s experience and utilize new types of chemometrics. 

“With the help of our colleagues at Central Queensland University, Nicolas Anderson and Kerry Walsh, we were able to import the coding necessary to do Artificial Neural Network Modelling”, says Galen George, Application Scientist at Felix Instruments.

In tandem with these advancements comes new and improved models for kiwifruit – specifically developed for Felix’s Kiwifruit Quality Meter.

The diverse data from multiple seasons, from various regions (New Zealand, South Korea, Italy), and from multiple types of instruments will be built into their quality meter thanks to the addition of artificial neural network technology. 

According to George, the use of neural network chemometric modeling, combined with this highly diverse data set ensures exceptional consistency across devices.

Among the general improvements, they have also updated the user interface, offering far more customizable options for users, ensuring that the device fits exact business needs. 

To create these new, robust models for Hayward, Gold3, and Red19 cultivars, Felix Instruments collaborated with global industry specialists:

“In New Zealand, we are collaborating with Start Afresh Ltd to execute an in-depth kiwifruit study. Having collected data from the 2020 and 2021 season, David Tanner and Sean McAlinden have provided us with the spectral data, as well as the destructive laboratory test results for the models that we built. Employing new chemometrics (ANN) with these highly variable datasets allows us to build even more robust models.”

Devices from Felix Instruments have a priority in New Zealand because there is a need for instruments that would be applicable to local fruits: 

“The F-751 is a small, highly portable and non-destructive instrument that can be used in the field and at multiple locations. Often, even with some more robust technology, you still need to harvest the fruit and bring it to your laboratory to test, and some of them still require the user to cut the fruit to test it, even with the spectrometer-based devices. The F-751 enables all testing to be done directly on the tree. I guess we are on the cutting edge as far as the chemometrics that we are using for these models, and with the ability for our users to customize their own workflow and to do exactly what they want to do. The customers have full access to the spectra, predictions and now they have full access to programming instruments to do whatever they want to do”. 

Galen George highlighted: “We’ve made these instruments with the thought in mind that there are other machine learning algorithms out there, and we want our instruments to be able to handle them, so now with this new technology we are utilizing in our instruments, we know that we will be able to incorporate other types of machine learning algorithms into our instruments in the future”.  

Felix Instruments will be holding a live webinar and product demonstration to educate kiwifruit industry leaders on both the accuracy and use of the Kiwifruit Quality Meter. Join Galen George for - Making "Light Work" of Kiwifruit Maturity Testing: Assessing Fruit Maturity Accurately In the Field, Without the Lab on Wednesday, July 7th at 2:00 PM PST.

To register for the webinar, follow the link

To learn more about Felix Instruments – Applied Food Science, visit their website.