The days of buying a rock-tough avocado in the hopes of avoiding mushy food waste may soon be over. Machine learning researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) recently designed an artificial intelligence program that visually assesses avocado quality and ripeness. Then, there’s the mountain of food waste to consider. Although prior approaches also harnessed images and machine learning for determining food quality, they generally required manual feature selections and traditional algorithmic designs that reduced their accuracy. Ma, Lee, and their colleagues also believe those numbers will easily improve as more avocado portraits are included into the model.