North America: McCain Foods Puts Ceres AI Field Monitoring to the Test in Grower Pilot

By Viktor Kovalev, POTATOES NEWS

McCain Foods is running a grower pilot programme built on the Ceres AI platform, giving its agronomy teams and contracted potato growers across North America a shared, continuously updated view of crop performance during the season. The programme was announced in July 2026 and remains at the pilot stage.

The platform combines artificial intelligence, crop imagery and agronomic data to flag sections of a field that are performing below expectation. Spotting these differences before problems escalate allows growers and company technicians to target irrigation, fungicide applications and harvest timing more precisely.

A central feature of the programme is that McCain and its growers see the same information. Both sides can view the alerts generated by the system and coordinate agronomic decisions around identical field-level signals, shortening the time between a problem appearing in the field, its detection and corrective action.

"Through this grower pilot program, we are working to provide our growers with better visibility into their fields and more targeted support during the season," said Jeremy Buchman, Director of Agronomy at McCain Foods. "By aligning our teams and growers around a shared view of performance, we can act earlier, focus on the right areas, and improve outcomes together."

For a processor of McCain's scale, regularity in raw material volume and quality underpins plant utilisation. Weather events, disease pressure or irrigation failures can cut yields, alter the industrial quality of tubers and complicate supply planning. Early warnings on variability are intended to make procurement more predictable.

Ceres AI translates field-level data into insights that fit McCain's existing workflows. "At its core, this work is about helping growers and McCain teams make better decisions, faster at scale," said Anubhav Sharma, Head of Marketing at Ceres AI.

McCain has not disclosed how many growers or hectares are enrolled, nor a timetable for extending the tool across its supply chain. Expansion will depend on results from this initial phase. The figures and scope of the pilot therefore remain projections rather than completed-season statistics.

Source: Argenpapa, based on the McCain Foods and Ceres AI announcement via PR Newswire (July 14, 2026). Read the original note at argenpapa.com.ar