Problem: Assessing the quality of food (especially seafood) is still done with a manual process: often hurting animals that are not eventually turned into food and costing farms thousands of dollars every year.
Solution: One great food that is often fished and eaten around the world is abalone (a fun video about how to catch it here). They are sea snails and marine gastropod molluscs that can be used to make gourmet scrambled eggs (as Gordon Ramsey has done), stews, appetizers in Japan, and more. It is known as the “truffle of the sea” and is rumored to be the rarest seafood in the world. Thus, being able to safely fish Abalone and accurately catch and weigh them is extremely important: the price of wild Abalone can run as high as $500USD per kilo.
The business would work to create AI models that can identify, count, measure, and weigh seafood (abalone being one example) from images. Moreover, the AI model could provide recommendations on which seafood is ready to be harvested and which should be rereleased into the wild. Phoebe Arbon (a James Cook University scientist) actually won a Science and Innovation Award for Young People in Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in Canberra for a project doing similar work. What’s unique about this business is that most of the technology already exists; however, it does not exist in this particular application. As Phoebe describes, “the project will introduce the technology to the abalone industry and produce large datasets which will have vast applications for production as well as future research and development of the industry.” Other scientists have done work to predict the age of Abalone (and other fish) through using similar AI models.
Machines and AI could be the new Lagotto Romagnolo, or the “truffle dogs of the sea.”
Monetization: Selling technology to farmers or farming Abalone and selling directly to chefs.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)