Plan Automation Technology Blog

5 Major Product Complaints X-Ray Inspection Helps to Prevent

Posted by PLAN Automation Blog on Wed, Oct 28, 2015 @ 10:10 AM

X-Ray_Inspection_Technology-resized-600.pngCustomer complaints are a fact of life for pretty much any business. Even in the packaged food industry, where direct interaction with the end user is rare, customer complaints still occur.

While some customer complaints might be inevitable, a high rate of complaints can be indicative of a problem with your production process. This is especially distressing when you consider that, for every complaint you actually get that isn’t severe in nature, such as slightly under-filled product or flavor lumps, there may be 100 to 1,000 packages being shipped with this error. This can cost you business without ever hearing word one from the customer you lost.

At any rate, customer complaints are something that most businesses want to keep to a minimum. Nobody wants to spend time and labor on placating angry consumers, or lose business because of a simple mistake.

While completely eliminating customer complaints is effectively impossible, there are ways to reduce the number of complaints that you do get. One method that many companies use to minimize customer complaints is to augment their quality control process with advanced x-ray product inspection technology.

What customer complaints do x-ray inspection machines help reduce?

Here are a few examples:

#1: Foreign Object Complaints

This is one of the most severe complaints a packaged food company can get from a consumer. When foreign objects such as metal, glass, or stones make into a packaged food product, they become a massive health and safety hazard.

In a best-case scenario, the customer sees the contaminant and avoids eating it, but loses trust in your brand. In a worst-case scenario, the foreign body goes undetected until the customer tries to eat it and gets injured or killed, resulting in a lawsuit and bad press.

X-ray product inspection allows you to detect multiple kinds of foreign bodies that manual inspections and even metal detection might miss by scanning for dense objects that don’t belong in a product package. Newer MDX (Material Discrimination X-Ray) scanners can even check for lower density contaminants that don’t belong in your product using their chemical composition.

#2: Missing/Inadequate Product in Package

While not as severe as the foreign body in the package complaint, missing products or inadequate fill level in product packaging is still a major cause of complaints from customers. When you promise customers 6 patties in a food package but only deliver four or five, they’ll take notice.

Customers don’t like feeling that they’re not getting what they paid for, and may end up going with a competitor product over your own if they get shortchanged on product amounts in your packages.

X-ray product inspection machines can make identifying missing product in a package easy with their grayscale snapshots of a package’s contents. For products that are loosely packed and need to be measured by weight (cereal, for example), x-ray machines can use a check-weight feature to spot packages that are under-filled.

X-ray inspection can also inspect for level fill in bottles and taller containers.

#3: Misshapen/Deformed Products

Many might consider a misshapen or deformed product a minor annoyance. However, for some food products, form can be just as important as taste. Also, a customer might see a misshapen piece of food as a sign of other problems, such as contamination.

The grayscale image provided by an x-ray scan of a product package can easily identify misshapen products in the package. For example, a hole in a meat patty would show up as a white spot in the x-ray image. This is something that metal detection or check-weighing machines would not be able to detect.

#4: Flavor Lumps

Sometimes, ingredients in your production process can solidify into a single clump. Flavor lumps of solid sugar/caramel or other flavoring ingredients might be a severe problem or a minor one, depending on the product.

For example, a lump of sugar in a bowl of cereal might go completely unnoticed, but a lump of pepper or other flavoring ingredient in a meat patty might be unappealing to a consumer, creating complaints.

X-ray inspection machines can detect these dense lumps of material in much the same way that they can spot foreign bodies. The lumps will appear as out-of-place dark spots in the scanned image.

#5: Missing Special Offer/Premium Items

Many food product manufacturers offer extras in their product packages. Things such as toys, instruction booklet, and puzzles are all examples of extras that might be included in a package to serve as an incentive to buy the product.

Often, these extras are aimed at attracting the attention of children to get the parents to buy the product. So, if the promised extra isn’t in the package and junior gets upset, that’s sure to generate a customer complaint right there.

Just like they can scan for contaminants that don’t belong, x-ray machines can detect if an extra item that’s supposed to be in the package is missing. This gives you an opportunity to repackage the extra in box/jar/etc. and keep customers happy, especially if you run the scan before sealing the package.

Customer complaints might be a part of doing business, but using x-ray product inspection can help you reduce the amount of complaints your company has to deal with.

Please download this white paper and learn more about the additional inspection capabilities of X-ray inspection.

 

X-ray, More Than Just Foreign Body Detection - Plan Automation

Topics: X-Ray Inspection, Product Quality