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When X marks the spot

31 May 2024

The versatility of X-ray inspection will help food processors maintain quality standards now and in the future, argues Torsten Giese.

Product quality and safety have always been important for food processors, but in today’s competitive markets, with pressures on margins and the need to maximise throughput and efficiencies on production and packing lines, the requirement for effective quality control systems has never been greater. 

This drive for quality is linked to the need to protect and maintain brand reputation – of manufacturers and also their retail customers, particularly when supplying private label products. Consumers are becoming more demanding and less brand-loyal while social media means they have much greater power to affect a brand’s positioning. So it is essential that companies take every step possible to ensure that product leaving their factories is of the highest quality.

When it comes to detecting foreign bodies in products and packaging, one of the benefits of X-ray inspection over metal detectors is that, whereas metal detectors can only detect metal, X-ray technology is more versatile and can also identify a variety of other foreign bodies, such as dense plastics, rubber, glass and stones. 

In addition, the technology can help prevent many other quality issues. It can detect broken, over- or under-sized, or missing items in packs. Mis-shaped product, product with cracks or fissures and sub-standard packaging such as dented tins, are other imperfections that can be identified. 

Full traceability
Some X-ray systems can also offer full traceability. In the event of a complaint, data management systems linked to X-ray inspection and labelling can enable retrieval of the X-ray image of a particular pack, establishing beyond doubt whether there was a problem. This can help to eliminate false claims.

Looking to the future, skills and labour shortages, together with the rising costs of both materials and services, are all likely to remain key challenges, and this will maintain demand for more automated solutions. 

Automation of food packaging helps to reduce manual operation and the interventions required, which in turn reduces overheads or enables the redeployment of staff. An automated process will also ensure an identical output every time and remove the risk of human error. 

Automation is key to the ongoing development of the Smart Food Factory. A major part of this is the way in which equipment on the production and packing lines can be integrated so that machines communicate seamlessly and work in conjunction with each other to increase productivity and efficiency. 

More recently, these integrated solutions have been further enhanced by the ability of the equipment to exchange live data with centralised and remote systems. This provides a high level of preventative maintenance where potential issues can be identified and even anticipated, so that action can be taken before machines and packing lines suffer any significant downtime. This allows better planning and deployment of engineering resource and enables service visits to be planned in line with machine usage rather than to a fixed schedule. 

Equally important, the data capture and analytical abilities of these systems are able to help companies manage their operations more profitably. Businesses need to know exactly how much it costs to get a product out of the factory and be able to easily identify bottlenecks or areas where there are opportunities for improvement. 

Torsten Giese is Marketing Manager – PR and Exhibitions at Ishida Europe.


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