Israeli-Colombian food-tech firm helps industry wake up and smell the coffee
Lady Gaga’s dog walker recounts being shot and thanks supporters
Most of us treasure our morning cup of joe, but few understand the complex technology that goes into choosing the best beans. Demetria, a company headquartered in Israel and Colombia, which is building the world’s first coffee quality and traceability data cloud to drive efficiency and transparency across the entire coffee supply chain, announced Tuesday that it is emerging from stealth after closing a $3 million seed-funding round for its AI-powered taste and quality intelligence SaaS startup.
The seed-funding round was led by Latin American-Israeli investor Celeritas and a group of private investors including Mercantil Colpatria, the investment branch of Grupo Colpatria, a leading player in the Colombian financial sector.
Until now, coffee-bean quality has been determined solely by cupping, a manual, expensive, time-consuming process carried out by the industry’s certified tasting experts, located in countries where coffee is exported to. Consequently, roasters and traders have had minimal information about the quality of beans they are purchasing until very late in the process.
Moreover, cupping is inaccessible to the vast majority of the 12.5 million small holder farmers that produce 60% of the world’s coffee beans and cannot determine or manage the quality of their crop, with many unable to earn a reliable living. Global coffee production is affected by many factors that make crop quality volatile and its market unstable.
Farmers’ inability to guarantee a consistent level of bean quality means that a significant number receive just a base commodity price for their produce. Quality is determined only later in the process, when beans pass through an extensive and complex supply chain that incorporates traders, processors and exporters. Consequently, farmers receive on average just 2.5% ($0.07) from a cup of coffee retailing at $2.80.
Demetria has pioneered the digitization of coffee aroma and taste, the most important quality variables of the coffee bean. For the first time,
quality and taste can now be assessed at any stage of the coffee production and distribution process, from farm to table.
Utilizing state-of-the-art, portable near infrared (NIR) sensors to analyze and fingerprint green coffee beans for biochemical markers, Demetria has created an AI-based data intelligence platform – an “e-Palate” – that accurately matches each bean profile according to the industry standard coffee flavor wheel. The company is launching a suite of SaaS-based solutions to replace age-old, manual production processes used to ascertain bean quality.
“The ability to discover the quality of green coffee beans is a game changer for an entire industry that’s relied on a primitive supply chain and artisanal processes for 300 years. It’s hard to believe that the world’s biggest roasters have effectively been buying beans with very limited knowledge about their quality, and that
the majority of coffee farmers, the most critical players in the supply chain, don’t understand the quality of their own crops and hence are paid unfairly, threatening the sustainability of this $450 billion industry,” said Demetria’s co-founder and CEO Felipe Ayerbe. “Our technology delivers vital intelligence to ensure crop consistency and quality control, resulting in readdressing the economics of the coffee value chain to benefit every key player.”
Demetria has successfully completed a pilot with Carcafe, the Colombian coffee division of one of the world’s oldest and largest agricultural commodity traders Volcafe/ED&F Man. Carcafe has identified a distinct high value “cupping” profile and Demetria has built a solution to determine which green beans will suit.
Demetria will use its seed-funding to continue to develop technology to improve the quality of coffee beans across the supply chain.
LOS ANGELES (Los Angeles Times/TNS) – Ryan Fischer, the dog walker who was shot as he resisted being robbed of Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs on a Hollywood street last week, posted a long statement on Instagram on Monday morning in which he described the harrowing attack and thanked everyone for their support as he recovered.
From multiple Instagram accounts, Fischer posted two pictures of himself in the hospital and wrote that, although “still in recovery from a very close call with death,” he was getting better and benefiting from the support and care he had received from the first responders and healthcare workers who had treated him, the police, fans around the world, his family – including his mother and brother, who he said flew to Los Angeles to be with him – and Lady Gaga and her team.
“[Y]our babies are back and the family is whole... we did it!” Fischer wrote to the singer, a nod to the fact that the two dogs that were stolen in the attack were returned to Gaga’s representatives Friday. “You have shown so much support throughout this whole crisis to both me and my family.”
Fischer wrote that a “lot of healing still needs to happen” but that he looked forward to getting “bombarded with kisses and licks (and maybe even an excitement pee?) from Asia, Koji, and Gustav.”
Koji and Gustav were stolen from Fischer in the 1500 block of Sierra Bonita Avenue in Hollywood about 9:40 p.m. Wednesday. The attack, which was caught on camera, captured global attention, particularly after Lady Gaga offered a $500,000 reward for the dogs’ return.
Asia, the third dog, was with Fischer at the time of the attack but not taken. Fischer wrote of the animal coming to his side, frightened, after the robbers fled the scene in a white Nissan Altima.
While the car “sped away and blood poured from my gunshot wound, an angel trotted over and laid next to me,” he wrote. “My panicked screams calmed as I looked at her, even though it registered that the blood pooling around her tiny body was my own.
“I cradled Asia as best I could, thanked her for all the incredible adventures we’d been on together, apologized that I couldn’t defend her brothers, and then resolved that I would still try to save them... and myself,” he wrote.
Video from the scene showed that Fischer tried to resist the robbers before being shot. In her own Instagram post last week, Lady Gaga called Fischer a hero.
On Friday, a woman showed up at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Olympic station with Koji and Gustav, saying she believed they belonged to the singer. Police said they did not believe the woman was involved in the attack or affiliated with the attackers but declined to explain how she came into possession of the dogs.