Clarifresh, Sun World Seek to Standardize Quality Control in Table Grapes

Branded table grapes continue to transform the category. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 consumers nationwide, The Packer's Fresh Trends 2025 found that among consumers who had purchased grapes in the past 12 months, 25% reported purchasing Autumn Crisp grapes, 37% reported purchasing Cotton Candy grapes, and 47% reported purchasing another branded grape variety.

And as branded grapes continue to drive sales in the category, it's critical for players across the supply chain — from seed to table — to ensure the fruit delivers a consistent eating experience every time.

With the goal of delivering top-quality grapes to consumers, Sun World International has formed a strategic partnership with Clarifresh, using its AI-powered quality management software for fresh food. Through the collaboration, Sun World, a fruit breeding and licensing company of proprietary varieties, is sponsoring the Clarifresh platform to its licensees, the growers and marketers behind brands including Autumn Crisp and Ruby Rush.

The companies say the partnership is intended to optimize quality control processes and drive greater consistency across the supply chain.

“Our objective is to work with the growers, with exporters and also with retailers to understand the quality of the different varieties, and also to make sure the brands we have like Autumn Crisp or Ruby Rush are well represented to the consumer,” says Pablo Gomez, director of quality insights for Sun World.

3 Benefits to the Fresh Supply Chain

Elad Mardix, CEO and co-founder of Clarifresh, says he sees three key benefits for customers like Sun World, who are using the Clarifresh platform.

The first benefit is the ability to tap into the “Clarifresh language,” Mardix says. “We invented the language.”

Mardix explains that the Clarifresh language essentially takes all the quality specs for each variety — which are usually in a 20-page document that can be interpreted differently by everyone from the grower to the retail buyer — and converts it into standardized digital specs.

“What we do is we take this 20-page document, and we help the customer convert it into a digital spec — to our language — and by that we essentially create one digital language to communicate and then assess the quality of a specific variety,” he says.

In the case of Sun World and its premium Autumn Crisp grape variety, Clarifresh can help translate the variety's specs to a digital format.

“And from now on, that's how everyone in the world who is growing Autumn Crisp and harvesting it should assess the quality of Autumn Crisp based on that [digital] recommendation,” Mardix says.

An Objective and Consistent Inspection Process

The second benefit, Mardix says, is where AI comes into play.

“We developed our own computer vision technology, which we have a patent on in the United States,” he says. “So, the customer can take a picture of the table grapes [with their phone], and the computer vision automatically analyzes external attributes, like size, color, secondary color — the stem color.”

Mardix says Clarifresh is now working on adding the same technology to table grape defects, thereby removing the human subjectivity of what someone thinks grape size, color, stem color and defects should look like versus the Clarifresh standardized model.

“The external attributes will come in a much more objective manner because of the computer vision technology that we develop,” says Mardix, adding that internal attributes will come through the integration of the refractometer's measurements of Brix or the durometer's measure of firmness as well as other tools being used to assess internal properties.

“If everyone is using the Clarifresh app through their phone — wherever they are in the supply chain — they will all get the same answer. That's benefit No. 2; we're making the inspection process objective and consistent,” he says.

This consistency on a global scale is key for a company like Sun World, which has licensees growing around the world. Sun World is initially offering these new tools to its network of grower-packer-shippers in Egypt and Italy.

“One challenge for us is on the day-to-day [operations],” Gomez says. “The growers and exporters do the growing and packing and everything [to bring the product to market.] And we have a technical team that support the grower during the planting process and the growing side of the season. And then we also have a quality team, which is the one that I am leading, and we are involved in the harvesting and in the packing. But it's not possible for us to be involved in every day-to-day activity, because we have many thousands of growers and exporters around the world.”

And each country has its own set of standards, Gomez adds. As such, he says one of Sun World's goals was to provide growers with a tool that allows them to control their own quality, inspection and packing processes, streamlining the inspection process around the world.

“Having a tool like Clarifresh can homogenize and harmonize the collection of data in the new era of artificial intelligence,” Gomez says. “Everything is data driven, but we don't have access to all the data, and sometimes the data we receive is not clear. So, we are in this process to make a more efficient collection of the data, which will enable us to make better decisions once we can trust the data at a higher level.”

Standardized Quality Management

The third benefit, Mardix says, is analytics that inform decision making.

“We generate real-time insights and reporting that helps growers and marketing companies or packer-shippers make their decisions,” he says. “Who is the best customer to ship this pallet of table grapes? Or should I accept this pallet of table grapes? They can make those decisions based on actual data and reporting, rather than the intuition of the QC manager or the inspector who stands in the entrance of the packhouse.”

By integrating Clarifresh's quality management technology, Sun World aims to establish a standardized and data-driven approach to quality control, ensuring alignment with the company's high standards from field to fork. Mardix says that by leveraging Clarifresh's AI-powered quality management solutions, growers can maintain greater consistency, reduce customer rejections and create a unified framework for assessing quality at every stage down to the seed level.

This standardization is also especially important given the labor crisis that plagues much of agriculture around the globe, Gomez says.

“One of the main challenges we face is that agriculture labor is struggling in many countries. It's difficult to maintain a team from one year to the other,” he says. “Maybe one year you have a team and you teach them, but the following year you lose that team, and you need to hire new people. The Clarifresh tool is an easy way of obtaining more homogeneous and trustable data that doesn't rely on human data collection.”

Next up for Sun World is to extend the Clarifresh platform to its licensees in Australia.

“I just met with Pablo's colleague from Australia last week, and he said, ‘I think it's going to increase the bar for everyone in the supply chain.' Think about it, the weakest link in the Sun World licensee chain is the weakest grower,” Gomez says. “The brand is going to be as good as the weakest grower. And when we [implement this technology], we actually raise the bar for everyone.”

The Retailer, Consumer Benefit

“For retailers, there are a couple of big benefits,” Mardix says. “The biggest benefit at the end of the day is the consistency of the quality experience that consumers have with the fresh produce. Statistics show that 72% of the decision [to purchase] will be based on the consistency of experience, the expectation the consumer has.

“And that's where we can be very impactful,” he adds, because if everyone from seed to the retail shelf is using these same Clarifresh tools to perform quality control, then there is no ambiguity on quality of the eating experience, which is what brings shoppers back to the store.

“That's the biggest benefit that we're seeing,” Mardix says. “I think the second benefit is that retailers are going to have earlier visibility into the quality of the supply that's coming their way. Today, they don't really know what they're going to get until it actually arrives to their distribution center and they do the intake inspection.”

Fewer rejections could also benefit the consumer, he says. As fewer rejections could mean that retailers would charge a lower price for the grapes because there won't be a 7% to 12% shrink for the retailer from the distribution center to the front of the store.

“I think that should translate to a lower price for the consumer, and a higher consistency of quality experience,” Mardix says.