EIC Accelerator Report Card: Clarifruit's Produce Inspection AI

Every pallet of grapes, berries or kiwis that changes hands is opened, sampled and graded by a quality inspector, and buyer and seller often disagree on what the inspector saw. Clarifruit, a start-up from Rishon LeZion in Israel, set out to replace that judgement call with a smartphone camera and a machine-learning model. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2019 cut-off the European Commission selected it for a grant-only award, listed under the acronym "Clarifruit Oct 19" in the Commission's list of selected companies, where it is the only beneficiary named for the project.

According to CORDIS, the EU contributed €2,242,625 to a project with a total cost of €3,203,750, which ran from 1 June 2020 to 30 November 2022. Seven years after selection, the company operates under a new trading name, Clarifresh, its registration is active in Israel, and in September 2026 the berry grower Wish Farms said the software had cut its inspection time by 70%.

What Clarifruit Is Doing Now

The company is active. The Israeli Corporations Authority lists Clarifruit Ltd with the status "active" and a last filed annual report for 2025, according to the register data published on data.gov.il; OpenCorporates shows the same status and address. Israeli private companies do not publish their accounts, so revenue, losses and current headcount cannot be checked.

In January 2025 Clarifruit renamed itself Clarifresh, widened its stated scope from fruit and vegetables to "all fresh categories", including meat, fish and dairy, and launched a self-onboarding version for small and mid-sized businesses, according to FreshPlaza and the company's own newsroom. The legal entity kept the name Clarifruit Ltd. No customer outside fresh produce has been announced since the rebrand, so the product the EIC funded remains the company's lead product.

The recent news is about produce. In April 2025 the grape breeder Sun World said it would offer the software to its licensed growers, starting in Egypt and Italy, according to Fruitnet. In June 2025 Clarifresh became an executive sponsor of the International Fresh Produce Association's shelf-life prediction steering committee, Fruitnet reported. In April 2026 it appointed a sales director for North America, and in September 2026 the berry grower Wish Farms said automated defect detection had cut inspection time by 70% and rejections by up to 50%, according to FreshPlaza and the Clarifresh newsroom.

The Technology: A Camera in Place of a Clipboard

Quality control in fresh produce is still largely manual. An inspector opens sample boxes, measures size, counts defects, perhaps presses a firmness tester or a refractometer for sugar content, and writes a grade on paper or into a spreadsheet. In 2020 Elad Mardix, then the company's president, told The Times of Israel that inspectors needed an average of 40 minutes to test three boxes of grapes, and called the process "inconsistent as it is subjective to the inspector, slow, and expensive."

Clarifruit's app photographs the sample with a phone or tablet and uses computer vision to measure external attributes such as size, colour and visible defects. Readings from third-party devices that measure internal qualities, such as sugar content or firmness, are imported over Bluetooth. A web dashboard collects every inspection so that a quality manager can compare growers, shipments and seasons, according to the CORDIS objective and the Times of Israel report. The difference from established practice is not the measuring devices, which the industry already uses, but the automatic visual grading and the central data record. Its customers can integrate the data with SAP and other ERP systems, the company says on its website.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective describes an automated "quality control as a service" platform: a smartphone app with computer vision, links to external sensors, a cloud database and a machine-learning model that would give customers "immediate savings of more than 50% of time and cost." The final periodic report, covering June 2021 to November 2022, says the company completed a user-experience redesign of the mobile and web applications, expanded the web dashboard to cover the full inspection process with monitoring, reports and notifications, and integrated the app with third-party industry devices. It reports a 2 to 3 times increase in inspector productivity at customers, and lists automatic defect identification as work still in progress. CORDIS lists no public deliverables or publications.

1. Mobile app with computer-vision gradingDeliveredIn commercial use at Santa Maria, Sun World licensees and Wish Farms.
2. Integration of external sensorsDeliveredThird-party device integration reported in the CORDIS final report.
3. Management and analytics dashboardDeliveredWeb application with monitoring, reports and notifications, per CORDIS.
4. Automatic defect identificationLateUnfinished at project close; deployed for strawberries at Wish Farms by 2026.
5. More than 50% time and cost savingsSelf-reported2 to 3 times productivity per CORDIS; 70% per Wish Farms; no independent audit.

The project closed on its scheduled end date, and the core product it described is on the market. The defect-detection model, which the final report still described as a goal, appeared in customer announcements only later. The efficiency gains are plausible and consistent across sources, but every figure comes from Clarifruit or a customer that took part in its announcement.

What Clarifruit Has Achieved Since the Award

The EIC grant arrived with the first private money. In January 2020 Clarifruit announced a $6 million seed round led by Firstime Ventures, a figure that included the $2.5 million EU grant, according to Globes and the Times of Israel. The company's dollar figure differs from the €2,242,625 that CORDIS records as the EU contribution.

In November 2022, the month the EIC project ended, Clarifruit announced a $12 million Series A led by Champel Capital and Firstime Ventures, with the Japanese machinery maker Kubota and NevaTeam Partners, according to Calcalist and HortiDaily. Kubota confirmed its investment without giving an amount. The two reports disagree on the total: Calcalist puts total funding at $15 million including the grant, while HortiDaily says more than $15 million on top of it. At the time the company had 25 employees and named Dole, Mucci Farms, Zespri, SanLucar and Pink Lady as customers. No funding round has been announced since.

Customer evidence has grown since 2022. The company published a case study on Santa Maria, a Chilean table grape exporter that ships one to two million cases a season, and the Sun World and Wish Farms agreements were reported by trade media in 2025 and 2026. Whether the 2022 customers are still using the platform, and how many paying customers the company has today, is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

Food waste has become binding EU law. The revised Waste Framework Directive, in force since 16 October 2025 according to the European Commission, obliges Member States to cut food waste by 10% in processing and manufacturing and by 30% per capita in retail, restaurants, food services and households by the end of 2030, as the Commission's food safety service summarised the deal. Objective, shared quality data between sellers and buyers is one way to cut the rejections that turn produce into waste in that chain.

The European link of this particular company is thinner. Clarifruit is an Israeli company, and much of its visible commercial activity since the award lies outside the EU: a Chilean grape exporter, a head of North America and a new North American sales director. Sun World's rollout to licensees in Italy is the clearest European deployment on the record; SanLucar and Pink Lady, named as customers in 2022, are the other European names.

The Verdict

Clarifruit has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.