Champ2Champ: Market power for the Dutch mushroom sector

For more than fifteen years, Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research (FBR) has been developing systems for objectively measuring aspects of quality for a range of products, primarily in the agricultural and food industries. Rick van de Zedde is the project leader of the Champ2Champ (‘Champignons to Champions’ ) project and is also the coordinator within FBR of the Wageningen UR-GreenVision expertise centre. FBR has developed a highly accurate colour calibration method with which it is possible to make objective, standardised comparisons of photos of arbitrarily chosen objects. FBR has also developed a colour measurement system for fresh mushrooms which automatically determines a mushroom cap's sensitivity to bruising from above. This is done using computer vision software developed by Mari Wigham, also a researcher at FBR. It utilises mobile measurement.

The expert human eye
As a supplier of compost, CNC is also involved in overseeing and developing improved cultivation methods in order to support growers. One of the goals is to improve the quality of the mushrooms, and an important aspect of the quality is the colour gradation. Currently, this is inspected visually: there is at present no method available for objectively evaluating the colour independently of human workers. This is also true for sliced mushrooms. One of the problems with sliced mushrooms is that they show a great deal of contrast (gills - flesh - cap), making it difficult to render a specific judgement about different parts of the mushroom. FDR has developed an evaluation method which is inspired by the expert human eye. The advantage of this type of automation is that the measurements at the same level are now more objective, more stable, and can be applied to much larger data series.