Nationwide sausage and bratwurst manufacturing giant Johnsonville Foods experienced the great benefits of x-ray technology first hand when they adopted Eagle PI x-ray inspection systems in their production lines. These innovative systems significantly limited product wastes, and even allowed Johnsonville to begin reworking rejected products by removing individual contaminants in a seamless operation.
Since an initial trial period, Johnsonville Foods has made Eagle PI’s inspection technologies their primary quality assurance system.
Background
The Johnsonville brand, founded in 1945 by Ralph and Alice Stayer, and headquartered in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, began pursuing a company-wide x-ray project in 2003 with the intent to ensure the safety and quality of their popular sausage products, and match rejected products with specific x-ray profiles for reworking. Specifically, Johnsonville Foods was looking for a powerful x-ray system with incredible detection levels and low false reject rate (FRR).
Most of all, when selecting the right x-ray inspection technology for their unique needs, Johnsonville Foods sought a comprehensive, efficient system; one that would prove reliable for years to come, with clean operation and relatively easy to integrate for their food quality assurance applications.
X-Ray Integration
Realizing their need for a powerful, accurate x-ray inspection system, Johnsonville Foods began looking into innovative solutions and competing inspection manufacturers that could properly meet their application requirements. Before Johnsonville Foods could find and adopt Eagle PI’s unmatched x-ray solutions, they gave numerous competitors trials runs in their product manufacturing plants.
The first of these systems, adopted in 2003 and used over a six-month trial period, immediately delivered unsatisfactory results, failing to meet Johnsonville’s quality assurance needs. Even in the first x-ray scan, Johnsonville found the competitor’s model scanning their products with a higher than normal false reject rate. The rejected products from this scan were then x-rayed again, revealing that over 2/3 of the original sample were falsely rejected; the competitor’s machine, essentially, reported contaminants and reject products with 30% accuracy.
These results, of course, are unacceptable for a nationally renowned manufacturing giant like Johnsonville Foods, where high quality products and production efficiency are paramount. With such high and unreliable false reject rates, Johnsonville would sacrifice huge amounts of production time, while also losing profits for unnecessarily rejected products; they needed a system with the best accuracy on the market.
Johnsonville Foods sought not only unparalleled detection capabilities when choosing an x-ray inspection system for their products, but also one with the ability to match scanned products with computer scanned reject images, allowing for specific product reworking and limiting waste. It’s for these reasons, specifically, that Johnsonville Foods came to Eagle PI and ordered the Eagle Pack 430 x-ray system to integrate with their manufacturing operation.
In addition to Eagle PI’s Pack 430 system, Johnsonville purchased two competitors’ x-ray systems for a direct, side-by-side comparison of the machines; they would compare these models, and find the greatest performing system for their applications. The Eagle PI system, large enough to be configured for dual-lane inspection, provided both a main inspection lane and a secondary, reject product “reworking” lane for Johnsonville’s production line.
The efficiency this gave to Johnsonville Food’s production line led to their full integration of Eagle PI inspection systems; the Pack 430 system could display both inspection lanes in a split-screen monitor, allowing operators to identify, remove and rework contaminated products. This significantly improved the efficiency of Johnsonville’s product inspection operation, and eliminated the burden of product inspection and false rejects on the overall production line.
The Results
In the end, Eagle PI’s Pack 430 system won Johnsonville’s three-system, in-plant inspection trial for its highly effective SimulTask™ Software and reject product reworking capabilities.
“We are constantly amazed by the consistency and reliability in the Eagle product line to detect and reject small contaminants,” said Johnsonville Project Engineer, Erik Larson. “The equipment purchases continually pay for themselves as our contaminant complaints have been significantly reduced with Eagle x-ray equipment.”
Since the initial system trials, Johnsonville Foods has purchased many more Eagle PI inspection systems for their unique x-ray inspection needs. With the Eagle systems’ reworking capabilities and incredibly accurate reject detection, Johnsonville Foods was able to cut back on their false reject rates and improve detection more than with any other type of x-ray machine.
Incredibly reliable, easy to operate and unmatched in their accuracy, Eagle PI x-ray inspection technologies quickly became Johnsonville Foods’ go-to resource for quality product inspection.
Learn More
To learn more about the product safety, quality assurance and production efficiency benefits a powerful x-ray inspection system can do for production lines, or the many other applications of x-ray inspection in the medicinal, beverage and dry-goods industries, contact us today. If you’d like to see more about how Eagle PI’s x-ray systems provided the perfect inspection solutions for Johnsonville Foods, click the lick below and download the full case study!
