It’s another day on the factory floor as your employees move about, taking notes on how production is moving, and recording facts and figures for their reports. Then, one employee sneezes or gets careless with his or her ink pen or stylus, accidentally dropping it into a moving production line.

You have a loose piece of plastic contaminating your product, now what?

The answer to this depends on a few different things, such as:

• The type of detection equipment you’re using.
• The material(s) used in the pen.
• Whether or not the pen gets broken.

Ideally, you’ll want to remove the pen and any contaminated product from the line as soon as possible so that any health and safety risks from the dropped pen are eliminated.

For example, say that the aforementioned pen drops into the food being processed just in front of an x-ray inspection machine. If the pen is detectable, the x-ray machine will catch it right away, and your normal rejection process can handle it.

However, if the pen isn’t detectable to whatever inspection equipment you have, then you might have a problem on your hands. Because, a pen or other item that falls into your product and gets caught quickly might be a nuisance, but one that gets into your product without being detected can be a packaged food disaster in the making.

What’s the Worst that Can Happen?

The worst-case scenario is that the employee who loses their pen doesn’t notice it in time and the pen, or shards of it, makes it all the way into your final product package and shipped out. From here, a contaminated package could reach customers, where it can cause harm, leading to product recalls, complaints, and lawsuits.

In short, a PR nightmare for your company that you have to deal with. Trust is hard to earn in the food industry, but all too easy to lose with just a single contamination incident.

With this in mind, how can you avoid that worst-case scenario?

Preventing the Worst

While no quality control system will be 100% foolproof against every possible contingency, there are a few ways to limit your risk of a dropped pen or other item turning into a full-blown disaster.

One of these methods is to use pens made out of detectable components that your automated product scanning equipment can “see.”

With metal detection equipment, this often means using tools made out of metal. However, solid metal pens and other equipment tends to be a bit more expensive, and heavy, than their plastic alternatives.

There is an alternative to using metal, however. There are detectable pens (and other components) that can be made of a special plastic compound that incorporates a metallic magnetic trace element that is highly visible to metal detection equipment. This makes for a great, lightweight alternative to making every tool your workers use out of solid metal.

With x-ray machines, the trick is to make sure that the material the pen (or other tool) is made of will be dense enough to show up on an x-ray.

Some Risk is Unavoidable

By using detectable components in your production line, you can minimize the risk that contaminated products will make it all the way to the end of your production line. However, it’s best to remember that you won’t eliminate all risk.

Why not? Say that the pen gets broken by a piece of machinery used in your process and is shattered into tiny pieces that are too small for your scanning equipment to detect. There is always an upper limit to how small a contaminant can be before it becomes undetectable to your equipment.

So, in addition to using detectable pens, it might be a good idea to drill product line safety into workers, and make sure that they have a way to manually stop the line safely if they know they’ve dropped something in.