Trait prioritization in crop breeding is foundational to ensuring developed and released varieties are adopted. While agronomic traits have historically been targeted for improvement, food and consumption quality traits are often overlooked, especially in public sector crop breeding programs. Developing tools and methods to measure these traits is an emerging area, and breeders have recently emphasized biochemical traits relevant to end-users, often targeting only a few compounds. The compositional profile of a crop not only affects variety adoption, but also processing, nutritional value, and consumer acceptance, yet is hard for most breeding programs to utilize for selection. This is partly due to the high cost of metabolomics, which is difficult to scale in breeding programs. In contrast, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) offers a rapid, cost-effective method for measuring the spectral properties of nearly any plant tissue within the NIR wavelength range. By analyzing specific absorption spectra, NIRS models can predict compositional features of plant tissues, such as moisture, oil, protein, and starch. Currently, NIRS technology is dominated by expensive benchtop spectrometers. However, portable NIR spectrometers, up to 60x cheaper, present a robust alternative to benchtop models. 

Many national agricultural research organizations (NAROs) face challenges in phenotyping key biochemical traits, particularly grain composition, due to financial constraints, limited skilled personnel, inadequate informatics, and sparse infrastructures. The high cost of wet lab analyses for crop nutritional profiling has hindered breeding progress. Portable NIR spectrometers offer a cost-effective, efficient alternative, especially for in situ measurements of compositional traits of various plant tissues.