The company’s earlier products include the Beluga and the Orca, which were designed primarily for enterprises intended for lab or facility-based use.
The Mini Beluga is the company’s most recent offering. It is smaller, lighter, more portable, and affordable.
“We stripped down some of the AI tools and made it more curated, so it could serve users who need less complexity but still need reliable quality data,” said Nicolette Yeo, head of marketing, Profileprint.
Profileprint is a Singapore-based company founded by CEO Alan Lai. The latest move is part of the company’s broader effort to lower barriers to make AI-powered quality assessment more accessible to smaller businesses across the coffee value chain.
“Over the years, we kept hearing the same thing from prospects: they loved what we do and could really use it, but they simply couldn’t afford a $25,000 solution. The bigger need wasn’t just portability, it was affordability,” Yeo told AgTechNavigator.
“We had to create something that could serve a different segment of the market, particularly smaller coffee producers, cooperatives, traders and roasters. This is about giving smaller players the tools to assess quality quickly so they can make better decisions across the supply chain.”
The Mini Beluga measures approximately 21 centimetres in height and weighs at around 1.3 kilograms According to Yeo, it is small enough to be balanced on a person’s palm.
“By making it smaller, lighter and more affordable, it can be used anywhere our customers need it, whether that’s on a farm, at a factory or at a warehouse,” said Yeo.
Standardising quality
By broadening accessibility, ProfilePrint is attempting to address quality misalignment across coffee supply chains.
“One of the problems, not just in the coffee industry but across many food ingredient verticals, is that how someone perceives quality can be very different from another person. It’s this misalignment of quality standards that causes issues, whether it’s rejected shipments or disputes further down the supply chain,” said Yeo.
The Mini Beluga is designed to help reduce those gaps by allowing both sellers and buyers to assess coffee quality using the same parameters at different stages of a transaction.
With the device, producers can objectively profile their beans before sale, while buyers can verify that incoming shipments, overall improving transparency, consistency and trust across the supply chain.
Not replacing humans
Yeo emphasised that its tools are positioned as a tool to support decision-making rather than a replacement for human expertise.
“We don’t want AI to replace people. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We don’t tell you whether something is good or bad. We tell you objectively and consistently what it is, and then you decide.”
Profileprint will focus on pushing out the Mini Beluga in the coffee sector where the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) scoring is already standardised and widely understood.
“With coffee, it’s a lot easier for us to work with because there is an industry-known and widely adopted way of scoring quality, which is the SCA framework. Everybody in the coffee industry is familiar with SCA scores, so it gives us a clear reference point,” said Yeo.
In contrast, other sectors such as tea lack a single, industry-wide quality standard, with grading often varying by region, company or buyer preference.
For other sectors, the company offers custom models and custom standards specific to each company or buyer.
