Although canning dates back over 200 years, modern inspection solutions continue to improve the safety and quality of canned goods. Canned food detection technology prevents contamination, physical imperfections, and other potentially dangerous defects from hurting customers and your business.
If a foreign object or packaging error makes its way into your production line, it can lead to costly recalls, reputational damage, and even consumer harm if not stopped in time. Thankfully, a variety of systems can help detect trouble long before that happens.
Importance of Canned Food Detection in Food Safety
From raw materials to the production line, foreign matter and microbial contamination can affect your product at various stages of the food manufacturing process. Food detection technologies are essential for quality assurance and consumer safety in the food industry.
Detection of Foreign Objects
Produce may arrive at your facility with pebbles or sand, meat may contain bone fragments, and any type of raw material may have glass dust or plastic shards. During production, machines may shed metal and employees may drop materials into the food.
These foreign objects can create choking hazards for consumers, cut their mouths or throats, and even damage their stomachs and intestines. To reduce these risks, companies can use x-ray machines, food metal detectors, and vision inspection systems to identify inorganic and organic contaminants in the canning process.
Contamination Prevention
In addition to foreign matter, canned and bottled goods contamination can include harmful microorganisms and chemicals.
Organic pathogens that can cause illness include molds, yeasts, and bacteria. Some are easy to eliminate through proper thermal processing. Others, like the potentially fatal bacteria Clostridium botulinum, are heat resistant. This makes canned food detection essential for preventing microorganisms from entering the food supply.
Hazardous chemical contaminants may also show up in canned products. These include unapproved food additives, excessive pesticides, chemicals leaching from packaging, and even compounds formed naturally during food processing.
Compliance With Food Safety Regulations
To meet FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) requirements, food manufacturers must establish HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control points) systems. These systems protect consumers by monitoring the production process, identifying potential contamination, and controlling for hazards.
Canned food detection plays a key role in any HACCP system, as it can test for many common food safety hazards. These include foreign bodies, chemical contamination, and microbiological impurities.
Technologies Used in Canned Food Detection
The food manufacturing industry uses several types of food detection systems, each with advantages and disadvantages.
X-Ray Inspection
X-ray machines are one of the most effective canned food detection solutions available. The technology penetrates the metal surface, allowing you to visualize the contents without damaging the cans. An x-ray system detects various materials, including metal, glass, plastic, rock, and bone.
However, x-rays cannot see everything. Because they work by highlighting density differences, they are less effective at detecting less dense materials like fabric, paper, and hair. They may also have trouble picking out contaminants in especially dense foods or foods with varying densities in one package.
Metal Detection
Metal detectors can locate metal of almost any size or quantity, including loose screws, screen wire, and even a few tiny particles. This food detection technology uses electrical conductivity to find ferrous metals like carbon steel and cast iron, and non-ferrous metals like aluminum and tin.
Metal detectors can also find stainless steel fragments, although their accuracy depends on the composition of the particular steel. Because stainless steel is more challenging to detect, an x-ray system is usually a better choice for that contaminant.
The biggest drawback to metal detection systems is they are incompatible with foods in metallic packaging. While metal detectors can be useful for identifying contaminants in raw materials, x-rays are preferable after the food is canned.
Vision Inspection Systems
Artificial vision systems provide quality control for canned, bottled, and jarred goods. They allow you to visualize features beyond the surface of a product. Examples include the absence or presence of a lid, color variations indicating contamination, and verification that a product’s label matches its contents.
For canned goods, vision inspection systems can help verify container uniformity, packaging integrity, label alignment, barcode legibility, and the number of units in a box.
Types of Canned Food Defects
What does food detection technology look for? Depending on the machine and production line, it may be looking for the following:
Physical Defects
Some defects are cosmetic, some are structural, some allow potential contaminants in, and some indicate the presence of contaminants. Repeated imperfection can also signal problems in your production line. In all cases, detecting physical defects is essential for quality control.
Can defects include the following:
- Fractures, holes, and missing seals: One of the most dangerous can defects is opening breakage. Some indicators of critical can defects include bulges, severe seam dents, swollen ends, plate fractures, torn flanges, and openings below the double seam.
- Distorted, dented, and corroded cans: Unlike the previous category, these defects appear in the body of the can far from the opening. They include stains, rusting, dents, and distortion. Damage often occurs during transport.
- Minor dents, rust, and buckles: Generally considered safe with proper labeling, these defects are mostly aesthetic. They typically occur during transport.
Contamination
While good manufacturing practices like proper hygiene and thermal processing can lower the chance of contamination, detection technologies can identify it after it occurs.
The list of potential foreign objects in products is nearly endless: glass, wood, plastic, bone, stone, paper, hair, jewelry, and more. Chemical contaminants include pesticides, unapproved adulterants, and heavy metal residue, plus melamine and bisphenol A (BPA) from packaging migration. Biological contaminants include yeasts, molds, viruses, and dangerous bacteria like E. coli, listeria, campylobacter, and salmonella.
Labeling and Packaging Errors
While labeling mistakes may seem minor in comparison, their effects can be deadly. Labels that misidentify goods or neglect to mention the presence of peanuts, shellfish, eggs, or other allergens can sicken or even kill customers with allergies. Consumer harm from packaging errors may also expose your company to lawsuits.
Quality Control and Assurance in Canned Food Detection
Quality control encompasses a wide range of variables, from product consistency to packaging uniformity. The right automated detection systems can help ensure that your canned product is safe, tastes right, and looks good.
Ensuring Product Integrity
Improper seals and weak spots provide potential entry points for food contaminants. That means even if your product leaves your facility intact, contamination may happen in transport or at the store. Stores may stop carrying products that sicken consumers, don’t look good, tend to leak, or otherwise cause problems.
Reducing Product Recalls
The worst part of a lack of quality control is the potential danger to the consumer. These public health issues can quickly become economic burdens, with recalls often costing food companies millions of dollars. Detecting product defects before they leave your facility reduces the risk of costly recalls or complicated contamination recovery efforts.
Maintaining Brand Reputation
All it takes is one major outbreak or product recall to damage your reputation. While you may eventually rebuild your brand image, you can avoid the issue altogether by detecting problems before they reach consumers.
Challenges and Solutions in Canned Food Detection
By now, you know all the benefits of canned food detection. What are the challenges to be aware of?
Variability in Canned Food Appearance
Maintaining good manufacturing practices and working with high-quality vendors can lower the risk of color variability. However, some color variation is often inevitable when canning products like fresh produce or seafood.
For that reason, color variability can pose a challenge for machine vision systems in the food industry. Choosing the right machine (or combination of machines), using the proper calibration settings, and repeating measurements can all improve accuracy.
Speed and Efficiency of Inspection
Adding a final detection step at the packaging phase is an essential part of quality control. But if you discover even a single contaminant at that point, it could create a system bottleneck. Your production team can add a layer of quality control, but not every defect is visible to the human eye.
Inline inspection machines automate the process, ensuring compliance at various points without stopping the production line. The right x-ray inspection systems, for example, have large capacities, anti-jamming designs, and ultra-fast rejection systems suitable for high-speed production lines.
Integration With Production Lines
For maximum speed and productivity, you should integrate your detection systems into your existing production lines. However, this sometimes poses infrastructure compatibility challenges. A thorough evaluation with your food inspection system supplier can ensure you choose the right system and seamlessly integrate it into your production line.
Canned Food Detection Solutions With TDI Packsys
Whether you’re looking for x-ray machines, metal detectors, or vision inspection systems, TDI Packsys has them all. We offer a variety of models and configurations to help your business maximize safety and quality without compromising speed or productivity.
Beyond providing customized inspection solutions to meet your needs, we offer unparalleled customer support. Our long list of after-sale services includes operator training, annual testing, remote and on-site support, and machine calibration and certification to help you stay compliant.
Call TDI Packsys at 877-834-6750 for more information.
