4 June 2025
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Tackling food waste has become his life's work for Marco Snikkers. With his company OneThird, he deploys technology to get fruits and vegetables such as tomatoes, strawberries and avocados to consumers' plates on time. "If you can prevent one rejected shipment with our technology, you have paid back our system."
"We can use light and AI to predict the shelf life of these products," Marco Snikkers explains in the podcast series Leaders in Food. "With that, growers, distributors and supermarkets can make much better choices."
Snikkers began his career at Philips, where he specialized in optics. He later worked for 15 years at Ocean Insight, an American company that makes spectroscopic sensors. "There I discovered the enormous potential of light to measure not only color, but also molecular composition. And therefore: the ripeness and shelf life of food."
Light and AI
In 2019, he launched an internal start-up within Ocean Insight's corporate environment. The goal: to develop a system that could use light sensors and AI to predict the shelf life of fresh produce. "We were given money, time and a lot of freedom for development. Within six months we had a prototype. And after a year and a half, a working system."
When the parent company shifted its focus to the medical sector during the corona pandemic, Snikkers decided to continue independently. With investments from OostNL and Shift Invest, among others, he founded a new company: OneThird. The company now consists of eighteen people and has an annual turnover of 1 million. OneThird's system is already being used in distribution centers as well as at supermarkets.
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