Market Overview

Because of rising interest to food safety by consumers and expanding influence of retailers, sorting out of foreign substance from food is demanded ever before. On the other hand, inspections for improving quality and productivity is required but in a labor-saving and automated way, due to labor shortage. Therefore, inspection instruments are increasingly needed domestically and abroad.

Although the market is expanding, the nondestructive food inspection instrument market for FY2019 based on the shipment value at manufacturers declined to 45,400 million yen, 98.2% on a YoY basis, as demand at major enterprises decreased and as the COVID-19 infections broke out at the end of the fiscal year.

Noteworthy Topics

AI and Deep Learning for Nondestructive Food Inspection Instruments

Deep learning, the most known subcategory of AI (Artificial Intelligence,) is also a subset of machine learning, but uses many-layered neural networks to achieve higher capabilities in learning as well as output than machine learning.

For food inspection, visual inspections by humans are still performed in many cases to determine good or bad of the raw materials and products. There are many challenges to completely automate food inspections because defective products are too diverse and difficult to making a judgement. To improve inspection accuracy in determination, deployment of AI (deep learning) into various nondestructive food inspection instruments has been eagerly attempted.

Future Outlook

The domestic market of nondestructive food inspection instruments have shown favorable growth, as cooking at home increased in the COVID-19 calamity, but export of the instruments is sluggish because people as well as things are restricted to move. The market size in FY2020, therefore, is expected to be 96.5% on a YoY basis to reach 43,800 million yen.

It is not obvious until when the COVID-19 calamity continues, but the domestic demand for the instruments is likely to keep being stable, and the overseas market to be on the rise, after the traffic for business recovers.

Research Outline