When you work in food manufacturing, your top priorities are to deliver safe, quality products at an efficient scale. Achieving this goal requires a refined food production line carefully calibrated to prevent errors and eliminate faulty products. Understanding the importance of weighing in food manufacturing can help increase food safety and efficiency at your facility.
While you may already have weighing equipment in place, it might not provide the level of accuracy you need. Read on to learn more about the importance of accurate weighing and how to adopt the correct technologies for efficient and safe production.
Why Is Weighing Important in Food Manufacturing?
Weighing is a vital step in the food production process, as it ensures that products are of the highest quality and consistency. Accurate weighing provides the following benefits:
- Consistency: Your products have labeled weights that finished goods must fulfill. By weighing items, you ensure that each product matches the advertised weight, which will also maintain quality between batches.
- Lawsuit avoidance: Your business could face a lawsuit for selling products that do not meet the advertised weight. Weighing helps you avoid this risk.
- Cost-effectiveness: Automatic weighing scales remove faulty products, so you don’t have to waste manual time weighing items individually.
- Data collection: Advanced weighing systems allow you to collect data on your production line so you can reduce weight errors over time to create a more refined, efficient system.
- Safety: As we’ll discuss below, improperly weighed products can create severe safety concerns for the consumer. Locating and removing these products keeps your consumers safe and helps you avoid legal complications.
How Does Weighing Ensure Safety and Hygiene Standards in Food Production?
Improper weights display an incorrect ratio or fulfillment of the product’s raw materials, leading to major safety or hygiene concerns. For example, an accidental spike in one seasoning may only cause a minor increase in weight while creating severe health concerns that put an unsuspecting consumer in the hospital.
In some cases, weight fluctuations can also indicate product contaminants. If the packaging gets dented during manufacturing and air leaks in, the food could spoil, causing bacterial growth to affect the weight. In any case, you must take the importance of weighing food manufacturing seriously, as it could have detrimental impacts on consumer safety.
What Technologies Are Utilized for Precise Weighing in Food Manufacturing?
You have numerous options for precise food weighing at your manufacturing facility. The most popular technologies include the following:
Checkweighers
Checkweighers offer ideal efficiency and precision. You can program the software by setting a weight range so the equipment will accept or reject products that do or do not fall within the acceptable range. At TDI Packsys, we offer numerous checkweighers, including those with multi-sorting technology.
Multihead Weighers
Multihead weighers portion out food using a feeding system, so you can accurately package food at the correct weights. The equipment feeds food through a funnel into rotating pans that move through weight buckets so each package receives the correct portion of food.
Conveyor Belt Scales
Conveyor belt scales provide dynamic weighing within the belt, allowing products to be weighed as they pass through the production line. The bench scale can be installed directly beneath the conveyor belt for accurate and efficient weighing.
Digital Weighing Scales
Digital weighing scales are the most basic form of weighing in food manufacturing, requiring individuals to weigh each item manually. While digital scales can be accurate, they must be calibrated to the right weight, depending on the product. For example, a five-pound scale will not provide precise measurements for a 10-gram product.
Innovations in Weighing Technology
As the food manufacturing industry continues to refine its practices, so does weighing technology. We’ve moved from manual scales to highly intelligent systems that automatically remove faulty items from the production line, so your team can focus on more complex tasks. Beyond this, we now have combination systems offering additional innovations.
Introduction of New Technologies Such as X-Ray Capability for Mass Weighing
One of the biggest innovations in weighing technology has been the introduction of combination metal detectors and checkweigher systems. Such solutions provide mass weighing and metal detection in one compact design, taking up less space in tight manufacturing facilities. X-ray equipment is just as vital to food manufacturing facilities as weighers, so the combination checks off two necessities in one.
Advantages and Applications of X-Ray Inspection Systems in Food Manufacturing
X-ray inspection systems provide key advantages for numerous food manufacturing industries. Such solutions can do the following:
- Detect physical contaminants like metal, stone, glass, rubber, or plastic
- Remove products with contaminants to protect consumers
- Automatically inspect products in an efficient way
- Help facilities maintain safety and quality standards
- Help facilities avoid food recalls, liabilities, disruptions, and lost sales
- Improve contaminant traceability
- Increase facility ROI
Any food production facility that wants to reduce equipment floor space by enjoying the convenience of operating just one machine could benefit from a metal detector checkweigher combination solution. At TDI Packsys, our combination metal detector and checkweigher systems can increase your facility’s efficiency and safety.
Consequences of Inaccurate Weighing in Food Manufacturing
Without an accurate food weighing system in place, your manufacturing facility could suffer numerous consequences, such as the following:
Economic Losses
When considering the importance of weighing in food manufacturing, economic losses typically come to mind first. Without the proper equipment to maintain product consistency, your facility could face lawsuits, product recalls, sale losses, supply chain disruptions, and more. Even with standard food scales, your facility can lose money on the manual time spent weighing items individually.
Product Quality Issues
Without precise food weighing systems, your product quality can suffer. When you weigh products by the pound, for example, enormous discrepancies can occur between the finished products. Product quality concerns could include issues with the product’s fill amount, ingredient ratios, product packaging, contaminants, and more.
Loss of Consumer Trust and Reputational Impacts
Inconsistent quality reflects poorly on your brand. Consumers may stop buying your products if they cannot trust whether the next bag of chips will be half full or stuffed to the brim. Over time, you may lose consumer trust, and your brand’s reputation may suffer.
Reputational impacts can lead to long-term consequences. One product recall can be extremely hard to recover from, causing your sales to plummet for a long time. You can avoid such severe consequences by adopting precise production line equipment that helps you maintain the highest product quality.
Health and Safety Risks
As mentioned above, inaccurate weights can pose health and safety risks to your consumers. Consumers could sue your facility if an unsafe product makes it through production and reaches the shelves. In addition to possibly endangering consumers by not weighing your products carefully, your entire business could be at risk of severe financial consequences.
What Are the Best Practices for Implementing Weighing Systems?
When you’re ready to implement a precise weighing system at your facility, you must take a measured approach. We recommend taking the following steps:
Define Objectives and Requirements
Many weighing systems exist, though not all will meet your facility’s needs. Before going online and shopping around, you should nail down your objectives and requirements so you don’t get overwhelmed by your options.
Consider what you hope to achieve when adopting the new equipment. Do you want to make your facility more efficient or more precise? Do you need to reduce product recalls or increase customer satisfaction?
After nailing a few specific objectives, jot down the machine’s requirements. To do so, think about your product. For example, liquid products may require different weighing systems than solid products, and lightweight items require different calibrations than heavy-duty items.
You should also consider the features you’ll need, such as pre-programmable options, data analysis, automatic product removal, and more.
Select Appropriate Equipment
Once you understand what you’re looking for in a food-weighing device, you can select the appropriate equipment for your needs. Depending on your requirements, you may choose a checkweigher, multi-head weigher, conveyor belt scale, combination x-ray machine, or similar device. We recommend comparing options from a few different suppliers to find the most comprehensive equipment for your objectives.
Ensure Proper Installation and Calibration
Upon choosing your equipment, be sure to follow all of the appropriate installation steps. You must calibrate the weighing system according to your products, so it will be sensitive enough to flag any deficiencies. You can typically set up the exact weights your products should have so the device can remove faulty items from the production line.
Training, Quality Assurance, and Compliance
After setting up the equipment, you should train your team so everyone understands how to use it properly. Be sure to implement quality assurance protocols, such as frequent testing and calibrations, to keep the device compliant with safety standards.
Now that you understand the importance of weighing in food manufacturing, contact TDI Packsys at (877) 834-6750 to learn more about our highly efficient and precise checkweighers or combination x-ray and scale devices.
