But churning out more food also carries an environmental impact and potentially compromises its quality.

Singaporean start-up ProfilePrint has developed technology which it hopes will address this challenge, while also saving time and money for agri-businesses.

If you look at the world ingredient trade today, you typically have the producer which are the farmers, you have the group of traders who buy to sell, and then you have the end-buyer who buy to manufacture.

The current process is whenever you have a buyer and a seller, the buyer will require physical samples before they were placed in orders.

And you can typically imagine a 2-3 rounds process between every buyer and seller, but you can then extend it to every part of the supply chain will have buyers and sellers and buyers and sellers.

So the amount of sampling work that is required is significant.

ProfilePrint digitalises food ingredients so that buyers and sellers no longer need to ship samples physically, allowing us to have a significant reduction in logistic costs, overheads, as well as carbon footprint.

Back in 2018, ProfilePrint caught the attention of a number of investors, including Dr Yukihiro Maru, the founder and CEO of Leave & Nest Capital.

CNBC caught up with him at the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology conference, also known as Switch.

He says ProfilePrint is well-placed to help agri-businesses on a global scale.

The big issue in the Southeast Asia is food delivery or food security.

So I think this is a very good timing to more expand this technology to the world.

So I decided to invest in this company.

ProfilePrint was conceptualised in 2017.

And that was when I was still travelling quite a bit, going to Africa, going to China.

I significantly remember this trip when I went to Uganda.

And then I saw that there were farmers who were trying to sell food ingredients at bulk prices.

They didn't have the expertise to make an assessment of how good their products are.

And hence, typically, they sell only at one price, even if their quality is good.

If there's a faster way to democratise expertise so that even down at the producer level, they're able to make better decisions.

As a Singapore company, over 90% of our revenue comes out of Singapore.

But the market is global.

So today, we are deployed in over 60 locations across all six continents of the world.

And I think that itself really is a function of because of our tool being digitally available, that clients can subscribe to our solution anytime, anywhere in the world.

In 2024, ProfilePrint signed agreements with Brazil's two largest coffee manufacturers, as well as Instituto CNA, a government-backed institution representing Brazil's agricultural sectors.

Brazil remains a global powerhouse in the production of key commodities like coffee and soybeans, and the country is modernising operations to address issues in quality control and sustainability.

We serve large companies because we care about them for the volume and also because they are instrumental in the supply chain.

And so the first part is that all data that is provided by our client belongs to them.

Even the models built on our platform also belong to them.

You really have hardware that acquire the fingerprints.

The software is the one that does the work.

Over here, we have the analysers and the platform of ProfilePrint.

This is our fourth-generation Beluga.

And this is our recently launched fifth-generation Oca.

Here, this is a bag of green coffee beans.

Typically, for our clients to not have ProfilePrint, they would need to actually roast this green coffee bean, grind it to a certain size, brew the coffee, let it cool down, and get a team of people to taste it before they can make a decision of buying or selling.

What we do now is we collect some of this green coffee bean, we open up the analyser, we place it inside, and we are now able to run the model.

Companies can create their own AI models on ProfilePrint's platform, which are able to assess whether the raw ingredient is a good fit for what they are looking for.

Traders can also build AI models for specific clients to determine whether the product fits their preferences on look or flavour.

The ProfilePrint technology is quite unique.

The core part is, of course, detect some waves in the material, but we combine with the AI part.

That is perfectly next-generation technology, I think.

The company's patented software has also developed over the last 12 months and has led to advancements in non-visual defect detection, one of the most challenging issues in the coffee industry.

Maybe there's one or even two beans that has accidentally fermented wrongly or may have an insect inside the bean that causes the entire bag to taste terrible.

But if you cannot pick up that one or two, you effectively will not be able to sell this lot meaningfully.

So the molecules are captured, converted into a digital fingerprint that contains this information.

What's happening is that the fingerprint is now being analysed by the AI model on the platform and within seconds, it generates the result based on industry standard as well as other important decision-making parameters all within a few seconds.

As well as predicting the quality and flavour profiles, the company's ingredient quality platform is able to offer their clients various options when it comes to balancing quality with price.

What we're doing now, we're letting the AI run its prediction on how to blend to achieve the best price at the best closeness to the target quality.

And you see within seconds, this has been generated.

We can now see the results that we recommend blend one using this composition at $5.93.

But if you are less sensitive to the quality match, you can go for 85% and only at $5.56.

The end goal is to streamline the whole supply chain and ultimately cut out human error.

They are still required to make the decision of buying or selling, but they now have a tool to help them make better decision.

Probably cannot replace a human, but in fact make the human more productive.

But of course for humans who are not adding value and not able to make higher level decision, then largely part of their job will then be replaced.

Profile Prince Rise has not been without its challenges.

In the early stages of the COVID pandemic, a number of big investors withdrew their financial commitment to the company and its future looked uncertain.

But Lai saw an opportunity.

Now people can't fly in to Singapore to attend trade shows.

If we are able to use our technology to repurpose for that, we may be able to then at least keep our income coming.

And we found a partner, which is one of the trade show companies, who said, give it a shot, but I'm not willing to pay for it.

But if we are successful, let's share profit 50-50.

That gave us our little pot of gold.

I would say that if we did not have COVID, to prove this value would have been a lot harder.

And hence I think it's a function of pure fortune and luck.

Today we have a group of investors who are able to give us a better, updated context of what the industry needs.

His passion to solve the issue in Southeast Asia, his presentation is quite nice because sometimes startup entrepreneurs cannot communicate with each other, but he can communicate a lot.

So they can bring the money, they can bring some network from all over the world.

So I think they can adjust to each market, not only coffee and tea, but also other food security markets.

Tea leaves to cocoa to chocolate, down to grains, spices, alcohol, milk, as well as even corn and soybeans.

We are looking to expand, but we are looking to expand meaningfully and cautiously.

We want to continue to deepen our knowledge in the current verticals that we serve, but at the same time, always look at what we deem as the adjacent problem that we can also use this solution to serve and expand our market size.