QSorter Explorer
The QSorter Explorer is a Swiss laboratory robot that analyses and sorts grains, seeds and beans kernel by kernel, combining 2D/3D imaging with near-infrared spectroscopy to measure physical and biochemical traits for breeders, food processors and inspection companies.
What is QSorter Explorer?
The QSorter Explorer is a laboratory robot for single-kernel analysis and sorting, commercialised by QualySense Analytics AG, a Swiss company established in Schafisheim. Its publisher describes it as "the most advanced robot for single kernel analysis and sorting, powered by advanced mechatronics and artificial intelligence", and names three audiences explicitly: breeders, food processors and inspection companies.
Every kernel goes through two measurement stages. A high-speed colour CCD camera, processing up to 120 images per second through wide-angle optics that cover close to 100% of the kernel surface, records shape, length, width, height, volume, colour and visual defects down to chalkiness and small blemishes. A high-resolution near-infrared spectrometer then works between 900 and 1,700 nm to measure compositional properties: protein, moisture, oil, sucrose and others. Both signals are correlated against wet chemistry measurements and standard visual inspection practice, which define the reference values; QualySense credits that correlation work to a team of algorithm specialists working with artificial intelligence, machine learning and regressions.
The machine then physically separates the sample into up to three classes. The publisher claims a sorting accuracy higher than 99% and a throughput of up to 30 kernels per second, or 100 grams of green coffee analysed kernel by kernel in under three minutes. These are vendor figures, not measurements made by Guidaio.
The product page structures three uses. In Ultra Fast Breeding, the publisher claims fewer wet chemistry analyses, up to 80% less seed waste and accelerated breeding cycles. In Automatic Inspection, it claims up to 80% of visual inspection time saved and a strong reduction of subjectivity error. The third is Research & Development.
Results are shown in a graphical interface and stored in the Q-One Digital Report, with statistical metrics — mean, count, standard deviation — at both batch and single-kernel level. The SQI2 platform, hosted on Google Cloud, is where reports are consulted and shared, with export to PDF or EXCEL.
This is laboratory hardware rather than software: 320 kg, 1,292 mm long, 768 mm wide, 1,720 mm high, 110-240 VAC at 2,000 VA, compressed air at 5.5-8 bar, and Ethernet, Wi-Fi or 4G connectivity.
What it does
- Load anywhere from a few kernels to several thousand into the hopper.
- Start the QSorter and obtain quality results within minutes.
- Sort the sample into classes for more advanced experiments.
- Share inspection and analysis reports through the cloud.
- Measure every kernel physically (colour, size, shape, defects, length, width, thickness) and biochemically (protein, moisture, oil, sucrose).
- Issue a report in the grading standard you want (SCA, GCA, ISO, COB, NY) or build your own proprietary standard in a few clicks.
- Compare samples across seasons, analyse a given supplier and follow quality over time in SQI2.
When to use QSorter Explorer / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if QSorter Explorer is the right fit.
When to use QSorter Explorer
- Seed breeders who need non-destructive sorting on compositional and physical criteria, so that targeted sub-populations can be isolated and field trials better prepared.
- Green coffee quality inspectors: the publisher states the machine screens for 27 defect types and 15 screen sizes and issues reports in the SCA, GCA, ISO, COB or NY grading standards.
- Quality control laboratories looking to replace manual visual grading, and part of their wet chemistry workload, with an instrumental measurement.
- Food processors tracking quality drift within a lot, or from a given supplier, from one season to the next.
- R&D teams that need to physically isolate kernels with targeted properties in order to build further experiments on them.
When not to use QSorter Explorer
- Anyone looking for software or an online service: this is a laboratory machine to be installed, powered at 110-240 VAC and fed with compressed air at 5.5-8 bar.
- Operations that need continuous, high-throughput industrial sorting: that is the role of the QSorter Horizon, a separate product from the same publisher.
- Buyers who want a fast, self-service purchase decision: no price is published and every call to action leads to a sales contact.
- Sites without a prepared budget and room: the unit weighs 320 kg, stands 1,720 mm tall and needs dried compressed air and a laboratory environment.
- Organisations that require public contractual commitments: the website publishes no terms of service, no privacy policy and no data processing agreement.
How to use QSorter Explorer
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Get in touch with the QualySense team through the request-info form and describe your application.
- Send in a sample of the grain, seed or bean you want measured.
- Schedule the virtual demonstration on which your sample results are presented.
- Request an SQI2 demonstration account for coffee through the dedicated form; the full account is reserved for owners of a QSorter.
- Once the machine is installed, load the hopper with the sample to be analysed.
- Start the analysis, then collect the sorted fractions in baskets or route them towards silos.
- Consult the report online in SQI2 from anywhere, download it in PDF or EXCEL, or have it integrated into your IT system.
- Use the Atlassian support portal with the credentials issued to you for tickets, known-issue solutions, manuals and video tutorials; the publisher warns that "Assistance requests that are made via other channels will be treated with second priority."
- Rely on the 24/7 remote assistance and the dedicated web customer area advertised with the product for day-to-day operation.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Biochemical and physical measurement on the very same kernel, which the publisher presents as unique on the market.
- Removes the subjectivity and eye fatigue of manual grading, which the publisher quantifies at 20 minutes per green coffee sample.
- Up to 80% of visual inspection time saved, and up to 80% less seed waste in breeding — both figures claimed by the publisher.
- Non-destructive, non-invasive analysis: QualySense states that analysed kernels remain usable for further trials.
- Repeatable results from one machine and one site to another, an argument the publisher puts forward for multi-site organisations.
- Backed by named research partnerships of the company: USDA, ETH Zürich, Empa and Agroscope.
- Complete technical specifications published in the open on the product page, which is uncommon for equipment of this kind.
Cons
- No public price, no pricing page and no order of magnitude: the entry cost is entirely opaque.
- No contractual document is published — no terms of service, no privacy policy, no legal notice and no data processing agreement (twelve paths probed, all genuine 404s).
- No mention of the GDPR, nor of any other data protection regime, across the twenty archived pages.
- The publisher claims integration by API but there is no publicly accessible API documentation, so the claim cannot be verified.
- Substantive support — manuals, tutorials, tickets — sits behind a credential-protected portal reserved for customers, so none of it can be assessed before buying.
- The site contradicts itself on its own identity: the footer and contact page say QualySense Analytics AG, while the structured data of every page still carries Ferrum Analytics and Sorting AG and a different address (11/13 Industriestrasse).
- Heavy physical constraints: 320 kg, a laboratory environment and mandatory class 7:4:4 dried compressed air.
Pricing & Plans
No price is published anywhere on the website: there is no pricing page, no range and no starting-from figure, no pricing entry among the 79 URLs of the sitemap and no pricing link in the navigation. Neither a free plan nor a free trial of the machine is advertised. The commercial model observed is the sale of laboratory equipment through a sales contact: every commercial call to action leads to the contact form or to a demonstration. What the publisher does offer before any purchase is an evaluation path — sending in a sample, attending a virtual demonstration and requesting a limited SQI2 demonstration account for coffee. A prospective buyer should expect a quotation issued after a discussion of their application; Guidaio will not estimate an order of magnitude the publisher does not publish.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how QSorter Explorer handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on the website: a dedicated search across the twenty archived pages returned zero occurrences of GDPR, DSGVO, data protection, personal data, nLPD or FADP. No privacy policy, no terms of service, no legal notice and no active consent banner is published, and no Article 27 representative, data protection officer, or legal or privacy contact address is named. The only privacy sentence on the entire site is "We respect your privacy.", shown under the newsletter sign-up of the contact page. One contextual fact is useful to the reader: the publisher is a Swiss company, and Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, its national regime being the revised Federal Act on Data Protection. Guidaio draws no legal conclusion from any of this: nothing published shows compliance, and nothing published shows non-compliance either.
Who owns the data?
The website carries no contractual documentation at all. Twelve legal paths — terms, privacy policy, legal notice, imprint, cookie policy and others — were probed and each returns a genuine 404, and the site's own Squarespace configuration independently reports termsOfService and privacyPolicy as null. Nothing published therefore states who owns the inspection data a QSorter Explorer produces, what the publisher may do with it, or with whom it may be shared. The only adjacent published fact is functional: reports are consulted through the SQI2 platform on Google Cloud, exported to PDF or EXCEL, or integrated into a third-party IT system, a full SQI2 account being reserved for QSorter users. Guidaio infers nothing further: ownership terms should be requested in writing before contracting.
Reuse rights
No contractual document is published, so nothing on the website describes what the publisher does with customer data, nor what a customer may do with the data the machine produces. A dedicated search across the twenty archived pages returned zero occurrences of GDPR, DSGVO, data protection, personal data, nLPD or FADP. Two technical facts are published and worth reporting as such. First, inspection results travel through the SQI2 platform on Google Cloud and can be shared with colleagues, customers and partners at the user's own initiative. Second, QualySense states on its technology page: "Furthermore, the algorithms learn over the seasons to produce robust and repeatable performance." The publisher does not say which data feeds that learning, and no conclusion about the use of customer data for training can be drawn from the sentence.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The only hosting fact the publisher publishes is a provider name: inspection reports are consulted through the "SQI2 Google Cloud", a phrase used as such on the home page and on the coffee page, which states: "Reports can be accessed from anywhere online through the SQI2 Google Cloud, downloaded in PDF or EXCEL format, or integrated via API in any IT system." Consistent with that, the application subdomain sqi2.qualysense.com resolves to ghs.googlehosted.com. Beyond the provider name, nothing is documented. No hosting country and no region is stated anywhere on the site, no data centre location is named, and no jurisdiction clause exists, since the publisher publishes no contractual documentation at all. One distinction matters here: the marketing website itself runs on Squarespace, on an anycast IP address geolocated in the United States. That is where the website is served from, and it says nothing about where customer inspection data is stored. Any buyer with a data residency requirement will have to obtain the answer directly from the publisher.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting QSorter Explorer.
- No public price: budgeting is impossible without going through a salesperson.
- No terms of service, no privacy policy, no legal notice and no data processing agreement anywhere on the site — established by direct probing of twelve legal paths returning genuine 404s, and confirmed by the site's own Squarespace configuration.
- No mention of the GDPR or of any other data protection regime, so nothing tells a buyer how inspection data is governed.
- Unresolved identity inconsistency: the footer and contact page say QualySense Analytics AG, Industriestrasse 11, while the structured data of every page still says Ferrum Analytics and Sorting AG, 11/13 Industriestrasse — and the contact address the site configures for itself sits on the former group's domain (qualysense@ferrum.net) rather than on qualysense.com. Both look like residue of the January 2026 rebranding.
- Integration by API is claimed with no public documentation to back it, so the integration effort cannot be scoped in advance.
- The company has changed hands twice in under three years (Ferrum in August 2023, IEH in January 2026): check which entity you are actually contracting with.
- The site exposes an inactive Squarespace shop (a /cart link) that corresponds to no real offer.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
This is not a software installation. A 320 kg machine has to be sited in a laboratory, powered at 110-120 or 200-240 VAC, 50/60 Hz, 2,000 VA on a 20/16 A fuse, and supplied with compressed air at 5.5-8 bar, 150 l/min, of minimum class 7:4:4 (ISO 8573:1:2010, a compressed-air quality standard), which requires a dryer and an 8 mm push-in fitting. Ambient conditions: 10-40 °C, 10-80% humidity. Ethernet, Wi-Fi or 4G conditions remote assistance and SQI2 access. A customer quoted by the publisher reports installation went fine; no lead time, training or commissioning detail is published.
Deployment
Behind QSorter Explorer
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly does the QSorter Explorer measure?
How fast is it?
How many classes does it sort into?
Which products can be analysed?
Which grading standards do the reports follow?
Where are the results consulted?
How much does it cost?
Is there an API?
How is support obtained?
What are the installation requirements?
Should you pick QSorter Explorer?
The QSorter Explorer is a highly specialised laboratory instrument rather than a general-purpose software tool, and it should be assessed as such. Its strongest verifiable point is transparency about the machine itself: the full technical specification sheet is published in the open, the measurement principle is described in detail, and the company lists named research partners including USDA, ETH Zürich, Empa and Agroscope, alongside dated industry distinctions on its awards page.
Its weakest point is just as verifiable and sits on the commercial and legal side. No price, no range and no order of magnitude is published. No terms of service, no privacy policy, no legal notice and no data processing agreement exists on the site, and the GDPR is not mentioned once across the pages reviewed. For a professional buyer, that is the most actionable gap in the file.
The corporate history deserves a read before signing. The publisher states that the company was founded in 2010 in Zürich, that it became part of the Ferrum group in August 2023, and that it was acquired by IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group in January 2026, becoming QualySense Analytics AG. Guidaio has confirmed none of those declarations independently, and references to the previous corporate name still sit in the site's structured data, so the identity of the contracting entity is worth confirming in writing.
Every performance figure quoted on the site — 99% sorting accuracy, 27 defect types, 15 screen sizes, up to 30 kernels per second, up to 80% of inspection time saved — comes from the publisher and has not been measured by Guidaio. Real evaluation therefore has to go through a commercial exchange and a sample sent in for analysis, which is precisely the path the website lays out.
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