Plan Automation Technology Blog

How X-Ray Inspection Machine Improved St-Donat’s Quality Control

Posted by PLAN Automation Blog on Fri, Nov 13, 2015 @ 04:11 AM

Learn how St. Donat Bakery used the Eagle 320 to help improve quality control.

In the Lanaudiére-Laurentides region of Central Quebec is the Boulangerie St-Donat bakery. This bakery makes roughly 12,000 pies and 3,000 cakes every day Monday through Friday, which are then distributed to grocery stores major chain retailers throughout Canada.

With thousands of customers consuming St-Donat’s delectable dessert dishes daily, product quality and safety are huge concerns for the company. As stated by St-Donat’s company President Guillaume St-Amour, “that’s why we need reliable product inspection equipment and the assurance of good service from our equipment suppliers.”

Recently, the company added an x-ray inspection machine to their product inspection process to compliment their existing metal detection system.

The Limitations of Metal Detection Alone

Before adding their x-ray product inspection machine, St-Donat relied on one inspection machine: a metal detector.

While great for detecting metal contaminants in loose-fill products, the metal detector alone wasn’t quite enough to meet St-Donat’s product inspection needs. There are a few reasons for this, such as:

  • Limited Range of Detectable Contaminants. Metal detection is great for spotting any metallic contaminant that doesn’t belong in a product. However, non-metallic contaminants, such as some rocks, bone, glass, and plastic/rubber can slip right by these systems undetected.
  • Inability to Reliably Check Some Packages. Many of St-Donat’s products come in aluminum baking/serving trays. These metal containers would trigger a false positive in metal detectors, making it impossible to check for metal contaminants in these containers with reliability. X-ray is not affected by metalized components in packaging.
  • No Image of Each Package. While a metal detector can record when it detects metal contaminants, there’s no substitute for having pictorial evidence of a package’s inspection. With x-ray inspection machines, a grayscale image of each inspected product is created for analysis. X-ray technology also provides full traceability and will store the inspection characteristics of each individual products for future evaluation.

This isn’t to say that the metal detector had no place in the product inspection process. In fact, for detecting metal contaminants that are either magnetic or nonmagnetic, the sensitivity of these systems is quite good.

To cover for the limitations of metal detection equipment, St-Donat’s management decided to add x-ray inspection technology to their production line at a critical control point just before the finished products are placed in a corrugated case.

Benefits of x-ray inspections for quality control.Benefits of Adding X-Ray Inspection

By adding a new x-ray inspection machine to their production line, St-Donat was able to improve the quality control for their products.

Benefits included:

  • Expanded Contaminant Detection. In addition to detecting metallic foreign objects, x-ray systems can also detect glass, bone, stones, plastic, and many other dense contaminants that would be effectively invisible to a metal detector because they aren’t metallic in nature.
  • Detection in Aluminum Trays. One thing that metal detection has difficulty with is spotting stray metallic objects through another metallic container. X-ray inspection technology, on the other hand, is able to pick up contaminants through the thin layer of aluminum that St-Donat uses in its pie and cake products with ease.
  • Check Weighing. Using three dimensional scans of an object and comparing them to reference scans for a product that has been verified as being of an acceptable weight, an x-ray machine can use mass measurement to determine the weight of a packaged food product. This allows the machine to quickly weigh a product to see if it meets the minimum weight required for the package.
  • Improved Traceability of Products. One of the best parts of using an x-ray inspection system is that it allows for improved traceability for products. Eagle’s “TraceServer” data collection software records important information for future recall such as over/underweight products and the types of contaminants detected. X-ray technology will also store the inspection characteristics of each individual products for future evaluation.

Using the minute metal detection capabilities of a dedicated metal detector at the front of the production line helps keep metal contaminants from making their way into the line from the raw ingredients used to make the pies. Combining this with x-ray inspection near the final packaging process helps reduce the chances of metallic and nonmetallic contaminants from making their way to consumers.

Overall, the combination of x-ray inspection and metal detection has helped to make St-Donat’s quality control better than ever before, especially with TraceServerTM software. As St-Donat President Guillaume St-Amoure says, “TraceServerTM provides us with due-diligence capabilities and has enhanced product traceability and overall quality assurance.

 Want to learn more on how St. Donat Bakery uses our technology? Click the link below to downland our case study!

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Topics: Product Quality, Metal Detection Technology