No one in the food industry wants to deal with a product recall for several reasons:

1. It’s a Hassle. Issuing the recall, making sure that you’ve sent sufficient warning about the contaminated products, and running damage control is, quite frankly, stressful. Product recalls are the stuff of nightmares for many companies, and a source of premature gray hair for more than one upper-level manager.

2. People Could Get Hurt. Product recalls are often issued because a contaminant managed to find its way into a product. With any such recall, there is a risk that someone could get hurt by accidentally swallowing metal shavings or eating food from a poorly-sealed package that allowed bacterial infections to grow. These injuries could result in expensive lawsuits and medical bills.

3. It’s Bad Publicity. If a problem is severe enough or gets publicized heavily, it can damage a company’s reputation. Trust takes a long time and a lot of money to build, but can be so easily destroyed in a few short news broadcasts. One product recall too many can put customers off of your brand, which can cut deeply into your revenue as sales stop.

These are a few of the reasons why so many companies that produce food and other ingestible products spend so much money on quality assurance techniques such as using x-ray inspection and metal detection equipment.

But, how can you be sure that your inspection equipment is catching contaminants in your products?

To help you make sure that you’re getting the best results from your product inspection equipment, we’ve assembled a few tips for checking your equipment and making sure that you catch as many contaminants as possible.

Tip #1: Run Tests with a Variety of Contaminants

The first step in verifying the accuracy of your contaminant detection systems is to do test runs with products that you know are contaminated. However, what many manufacturers do is test with spherical bits of metal that are easy to detect from any angle.

While these make for a good test of basic functionality, the contaminants you’ll actually get in your production line are rarely going to be so large and regularly shaped as a sphere. To really test your product inspection system, you’ll want to test it with a variety of contaminants.

Ideal contaminant tests include metal shavings inserted at irregular angles and intervals, small pieces of wire, non-metal contaminants that might likely find their way into your products, and even broken seals. By using a variety of contaminants and rejection factors, especially ones so small as to be barely within the detection range of your equipment, you’ll be better able to find out how effective your system is at identifying contaminants and other issues with your products.

Tip #2: Run Tests in High Stress Conditions

It’s one thing for a detection system to catch contaminants in a product package in slow, one-off lab tests. It’s another thing entirely for that detection equipment to catch a tiny contaminant in a production line that is running at maximum capacity, let alone a production chain involving multiple products.

Whenever you can, run your tests at the maximum possible speed and in the highest stress conditions that you can. This is the best way to establish the reliability of your product inspection system under pressure.

If you find that a particular type of contamination is slipping past your system with any sort of frequency, you’ve identified a possible weakness that you may need to reinforce your detection protocol against.

Tip #3: Using More than One Inspection System

Now that we’ve covered a couple of tips for enhancing the quality of your production inspection equipment tests, how might your improve the quality of your product inspection in practice?

Introducing some inspection redundancy into your production line is an excellent way to minimize the risk of a contaminated product making out of your factory. When setting up secondary or event tertiary inspection stations, consider having either the scanning device or the product oriented in different directions at each inspection station to ensure that the chances of a contaminant being missed because it’s smallest point was “end on” with the scanner are minimized.

Depending on your setup and the type of inspection equipment you use, this can be a very expensive solution to the problem of finding contaminants and making sure they don’t reach the end user. However, would an extra scanning machine or two cost more or less than a product recall and its associated hassles?

Finally, please remember that there are no perfect inspection technologies available and that more often than not, the best inspection solution is a combination of more than one different types of inspection technology (i.e. X-ray and Metal Detection combined).

Learn more about how you can protect your company from the risks associated with contaminated products by contacting Plan Automation today!