SUCCESS STORY
Preserving Expertise and Optimising Processes
Scaling quality capabilities across operations
Challenge
Sri Lanka has a thriving tea industry, with more than 300,000 workers employed in the industry. Tea tasting, a crucial aspect of the trade, relies heavily on the expertise of highly skilled tea tasters who have honed their skills over decades.
Our client, one of Sri Lanka’s oldest tea companies, faced a critical knowledge transfer challenge. Their master tea tasters, with decades of expertise defining their brand’s quality standards, were approaching retirement. While they had talented newer tasters on the team, that level of expertise takes years to develop. The challenge is intensified during peak harvest seasons, when even experienced tasters struggle to evaluate thousands of samples weekly, risking inconsistent quality assessments when volume matters most.
Solution
We partnered with their master tea tasters to mimic their decision-making process for two key product standards (STD 3 and STD 6). This helps preserve their expertise while increasing the team’s overall capacity during busy periods. These AI models also serve as valuable training tools for new tea tasters, accelerating their learning curve and maintaining quality standards.
Despite working with limited sample sets (18 for STD 3, 28 for STD 6), the models achieved remarkable results: 100% agreement for STD 3 and 87% consistency with the master taster’s evaluations for STD 6. The models also proved to be adaptable, successfully evaluating both whole leaves and tea fannings.
When the models encounter ambiguous samples, they’re flagged for the master taster’s evaluation. Their assessment then becomes new training data, continuously enhancing the model’s understanding of their quality standards.
What this means for your business
ProfilePrint now supports this tea company’s quality operations, helping them to:
- Optimise expert time allocation with master tasters focusing on complex assessments while ProfilePrint handles routine screenings
- Scale capacity efficiently processing significantly more samples, especially during peak harvest seasons
- Ensure knowledge continuity maintaining consistent quality standards as their team grows and evolves
Expertise in food quality assessment is developed over decades and often resides with key individuals. ProfilePrint helps you extend that knowledge across your operations, maintaining consistent standards while supporting your team during high-volume periods. Your experts guide the quality decisions, while ProfilePrint handles the initial screening and provides valuable training support for developing team members, ensuring the quality your customers expect remains consistent.
Is ProfilePrint for you?
Let us see how we can help you leverage AI for your business.
Speak to a member of our team today.