Plan Automation Technology Blog

Serve Safer Spuds with X-Ray Inspection for Potatoes!

Posted by Mat Bedard on Thu, May 5, 2016 @ 13:05 PM

potatoes-2.jpgIn America alone, millions of pounds of potatoes are produced, sold, and consumed each year. According to data from the National Potato CouncilAmerican farmers produced 434,652 cwt (short hundredweights) of potatoes in 2013 alone. That’s 434,652,000 pounds (217,326 tons) of potatoes produced in a single year.

That’s a lot of potatoes.

As with any mass-produced food product, ensuring product safety through traditional inspection means is problematic at best, nigh impossible at worst. Thankfully, modern technology can make ensuring product safety and quality in popular produce products like potatoes easy.

Enter x-ray product inspection for potatoes.

What X-Ray Inspection Can Spot in Spuds

As a tuber, potatoes are exposed to a lot of unseen contaminants in the soil. As spuds grow, they can pick up all kinds of unwanted foreign objects. Other potatoes might experience issues that cause hollowness (or hollow hearts) and decay while leaving the surface of the spud looking pristine.

Detecting these issues with a visual inspection of the surface can be nearly impossible, which is why many potato producers now integrate specialized inspection technologies, like material discrimination x-ray scanners.

Common potato problems that x-ray inspection can help you find include:

  • Needles, nails, and staples
  • Stainless steel and other ferrous or non-ferrous metal contaminants
  • Glass shards
  • Stones
  • High-density plastic and rubber compounds
  • Hollow hearts

Some of the above issues, such as metallic foreign bodies, could be located using visual inspections or metal detection, but x-ray inspection expands the list of quality and safety issues that can be detected greatly without slowing down your production line. In fact, it is faster and more reliable than manual inspections.

CHECK OUT OUR POTATO INSPECTION PAGE HERE!

Let Us Support Your Food Safety Initiatives

Plan Automation’s staff has over two century of combined experience in packaging automation and inspection. Our experts can help you find the perfect solution for your product inspection needs.

With the right potato product inspection equipment, you can keep your customers safe, and your production line running smoothly.

Please find a white paper on the technology here.

 

Topics: X-Ray Inspection