Insort: The EIC Accelerator Food Scanner That Drew a Buyout Fund

Most food factories still learn what is in their product the slow way: a worker pulls a sample off the line, a laboratory analyses it, and the result arrives after the batch has moved on. Insort, a maker of optical sorting machines in the Styrian village of Berndorf, near Kirchberg an der Raab, builds a scanner that reads the chemistry of every potato strip, nut or piece of meat as it passes. In the EU's 3 April 2019 round of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, it won a grant of €1,120,246.75 to make that scanner ready for series production, according to CORDIS.

The project, Food Monitor, ended in July 2021 with a certified machine. The Sherlock Food Analyser is on Insort's price list today. The bigger change came at shareholder level: in November 2023 the Swedish private equity firm Alder took a majority stake, and Insort is now the core of a buy-and-build group that has since added an American and a Danish inspection company.

Where Insort Stands in 2026

Insort is trading. The Austrian company register lists annual accounts filed every year from 2021, the latest in January 2026, and no insolvency entry. In June 2026 the company presented a new snack sorter, the Sherlock Belt Compact, which inspects chips and nuts in free flight with a 4K colour camera and deep-learning software, at SNACKEX 2026 in Portugal, according to PotatoPro. That announcement gives Germany as Insort's headquarters, which neither the register nor the company supports: both place it in Berndorf, Austria.

Leadership has changed twice since the buyout. Founder Matthias Jeindl handed the managing director's role to Markus Schlagbauer, a physicist who had led Insort's research, at the start of 2024, according to PotatoPro, and North Data shows Jeindl leaving the register as managing director in December 2023. Eighteen months later, on 1 July 2025, Lukas Lackner, until then head of the US subsidiary Insort Inc., replaced Schlagbauer, the company announced; the register recorded the change in August 2025.

The Technology: Infrared Chemistry on a Moving Belt

Insort's core is what it calls Chemical Imaging Technology, a form of hyperspectral imaging. The machine shines infrared light on the product stream and measures which wavelengths each object absorbs, which reveals water, starch, sugar or fat content, not just colour and shape. Ordinary optical sorters see the surface; a hyperspectral camera can tell a stone from a potato of the same colour, or a dry fry from a soggy one. Insort's founding partner EVK DI Kerschhaggl, a hyperspectral camera maker from Graz, was among its original shareholders, according to North Data and the CORDIS record of its first EU project.

The analyser is older than the grant. Insort first showed it, as the "Sherlock + Analyst", at the Interpom trade fair in Belgium in November 2014, with "approximately 80,000 measuring points", according to PotatoPro, and it won a gold Anuga FoodTec award in Cologne in March 2015, according to a second PotatoPro report and Insort's own history. Its first use was measuring dry matter in potatoes, the figure that decides how much oil and energy a fry line uses. In 2023 Insort said a single analyser could save a processor "up to EUR 1.7 m" a year by stabilising the line, according to PotatoPro; the same figure is on the product page. It is the company's own calculation, and no customer has confirmed it publicly.

What Food Monitor Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Insort applied in two stages. A four-month Phase 1 feasibility study, FoodMonitor, received €50,000 of a €71,429 budget in 2018. Its report said the scanner would be "fully mature" by 2021 and forecast cumulative revenue of €50.46 million in its first five years on the market. The application put Insort at 30 employees and €5 million in annual turnover, and promised revenue of "about €14 million in the third year of commercialization" and about 12 new staff.

The Phase 2 project ran from 1 August 2019 to 31 July 2021, with Insort as the only beneficiary; the Commission's list of the April 2019 winners names no partner company. Its aim, according to CORDIS, was to bring the analyser to TRL 9 and prepare a market launch in 2021. The final periodic report describes rebuilt software with an OPC UA interface for factory control systems, new hyperspectral and colour cameras, links to Siemens and Allen-Bradley controllers, CE, "UL-ready" and EMC certification, and field tests of the final prototype at Farm Frites, Mydibel and Lamb Weston Austria. It counts about 200 customer visits, four conferences and four trade fairs, and trademark applications for "Insort" and "Sherlock". COVID-19 caused delays and a restructuring of the project workforce, and the field tests turned up "several points of improvements".

1. Series-ready analyser at TRL 9DeliveredPrototype approved and certified (CE, EMC, UL-ready) per the CORDIS report; sold as the Sherlock Food Analyser.
2. Field tests with customersDeliveredFarm Frites, Mydibel and Lamb Weston Austria, per the company's own CORDIS report; none of the three has commented publicly.
3. Launch at Interpom, November 2021Not verifiedInterpom took place on 28 to 30 November 2021, per PotatoPro; no launch announcement by Insort was found. The analyser was being marketed by April 2023.
4. Uses beyond potatoes: nuts, meat, tobaccoPartlyThe product page lists nuts, meat, poultry, confectionery and dried fruit; the offers to a tobacco company named in the report led to no public sale.
5. About €14M revenue in the third year, 12 more staffNot verifiedNo revenue figure is freely available; staff grew from 30 to a 51 to 100 band, per karriere.at.

On the technical side, the record is clean: Insort built what it said it would build, on time apart from COVID slippage, and the product exists. The commercial promises are another matter. How many analysers Insort has sold, and how much of its revenue comes from them rather than from its sorting machines, is not public.

What Changed After the Grant: Private Equity

On 1 November 2023 Insort announced that the Nordic investor Alder had joined as a shareholder, according to PotatoPro. Law firm CMS, which advised the buyer, described the deal as the acquisition of a majority stake by the fund Alder Investment III, according to CEE Legal Matters. North Data shows Eivis GmbH as the shareholder from November 2023, replacing earlier holders including EVK DI Kerschhaggl and Feldbacher Fruit Partners. The purchase price has not been disclosed. Alder partner Dag Broman called Insort "a strong platform for further acquisitions".

The acquisitions followed. In spring 2025 Alder Investment III also bought a majority of Qcify, a US and Belgian maker of AI quality-control systems for the food industry, and the two companies announced a partnership, according to CMS and Food Business MEA. On 24 April 2025 Insort itself bought TriVision, a Danish machine vision company, from the private equity firm Vækstpartner Kapital and its managers, according to Globalscope and Carlsquare, which advised the sellers, and Potato Business. The three now trade as the eivis group, which says it works in more than 50 countries with more than 300 customers; neither figure is independently confirmed.

The size of the company is harder to pin down. Insort's 2018 EU application gave 30 employees and €5 million in turnover. Its employer profile on karriere.at now gives a band of 51 to 100 staff and says it hires six to ten people a year. Its revenue, equity and exact headcount are in filings that the register and North Data release only for a fee, and were not checked for this article.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's revised Waste Framework Directive, Directive 2025/1892, sets the bloc's first binding food waste targets: a 10% cut in processing and manufacturing and a 30% cut per person in retail and consumption by 2030, against the 2021 to 2023 average, as the European Parliament also sets out. Inline measurement that pulls bad raw material out early and tunes peeling, drying and frying is one of the few tools aimed squarely at the processing share. Food safety is the second argument: the analyser is meant to catch foreign material and contamination that a camera tuned to colour misses.

Ownership is the third point. Insort is still run from its Austrian headquarters, and the group that now controls it is European: a Swedish fund owns the majority, Insort owns the Danish TriVision, and Qcify, its sister company under the same fund, has Belgian roots. The EU grant helped a regional Styrian firm finish a product, and the firm then became a platform for a buyout fund's acquisitions. That is a European consolidation, not a sale abroad.

The Verdict

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