In the food industry, it’s becoming more and more important to make sure that products not only get made fast enough to keep up with demand, but to ensure that these products are free of defects that could harm or upset consumers.

How do x-ray systems help you enforce quality control? And, what are the benefits of x-ray technology? Here are a few answers to these important questions:

Scanning Product Packages Inside and Out so You Don’t Miss a Thing

One of the problems with traditional visual inspections of product packaging is that it’s so easy to miss tiny contaminants such as metal shavings, especially when they’re buried inside of the food product. X-ray inspection can detect both metallic and non-metallic contaminants within your product package that don’t belong there.

X-ray inspection systems accomplish this with incredibly focused, low-yield scans of product packages that take a grayscale snapshot of your product package’s density and highlight differences between the package being scanned and your acceptance standard. If the product doesn’t match up to your predetermined acceptance standard, it sends a signal to your automated rejection system to remove the bad product from the line without the need for intervention by a human operator.

Picking up on Missing Contents to Keep Customers Satisfied

In addition to spotting potentially harmful contaminants quickly, x-ray inspection technology can help you to quickly and accurately spot when package contents are missing. By measuring the product package’s weight, area, volume, and fill level to compare to your acceptance standard, an x-ray inspection machine can easily spot when a package is over or under-filled so that you don’t send incomplete products to customers or use up more materials than you should.

Even if a package is free of contaminants, missing contents will not go unnoticed by consumers who will voice their dissatisfaction by spending their money elsewhere.

With x-ray inspection, detecting missing products is a piece of cake, allowing to make sure that your customers get the products they pay for, keeping them satisfied.

Increased Speed and Reduced Labor for Product Inspection

Another problem with manually inspecting products is that a thorough inspection takes time. Even an experienced inspector would need several seconds to make just a cursory check of a product. Just for argument’s sake, let’s say that a really good product inspector could check up to 20 items in a minute, taking only three seconds with each product. This would allow the inspector to check up to 9,600 packages in a single eight-hour shift if he or she didn’t take any breaks. That sounds like a lot.

Compare that to an x-ray inspection machine such as the Eagle Pack 240, which can inspect up to 1200 items per minute. It would only take this machine 8 minutes to check the same number of packages that would have taken eight hours for a really fast inspection specialist to check, and the x-ray machine will spot contaminants and packaging errors that would be invisible to the human eye. In an eight-hour shift, this machine could check up to 576,000 packages.

In short, one x-ray inspection station has enough throughput to replace 60 manual inspection stations easily while vastly improving the accuracy of your inspection process. This is assuming that it only takes 3 seconds for a manual inspection, longer inspection processes further increase the advantage of using x-ray inspection.

The Summary

X-ray inspection has the potential to increase the accuracy of your product inspection, keeping your customers safe and happy, which helps to keep your reputation safe and your company name clear of scandals. Furthermore, x-ray inspection improves your production efficiency by automating your quality control process, increasing the speed of the inspection process immensely, saving you time and labor.

Learn more about how x-ray inspection systems work today by signing up for a free copy of our whitepaper at the link below!