Fotenix lets growers do more with less, helping commercial fresh produce businesses remain profitable despite mounting climate, labour, and regulatory pressure.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Manchester, the company provides automated scouting platforms for protected growing. Its systems scan every plant daily and use AI to flag pests and diseases up to 80% faster than manual scouting, so growers can act earlier, target interventions, reduce waste, and protect yield.
How it works
In protected growing, manual crop walks are still the most common way to monitor plant health and productivity. Labour shortages mean this is expensive and most operations struggle to check each plant once a week, meaning issues like pest infestations and diseases can be quite advanced by the time they’re spotted.
Fotenix not only automates the crop walk, but analyses the relative health of every plant, every day. Its AI-driven spectral imaging targets specific colours associated with plant stress and fruit quality, to detect pest and disease activity before any visible symptoms appear.
Developed with leading growers
Designed, built, and supported entirely in the UK, Fotenix was developed with input from Berry Gardens, Ava Berries, Thanet Earth, and AbbeyView Produce, and informed by collaborations with leading agri-research sites including UKATC, Rothamsted Research and NIAB.
In commercial deployments it has been shown to halve labour for quality control and reduce time to detection by 80%.
Why this matters
Fresh produce margins are under sustained pressure. Labour is harder to find and more expensive every season. Regulation is removing chemical controls faster than alternatives arrive. Growers need early warning they can trust, that enables them to act fast, limit interventions, and frees up skilled staff to focus on decision making rather than observation. Fotenix does just that.
Find out more at fotenix.tech