Food contamination is one of the most significant issues of the modern world, with polluted water, degraded soil, and unsafe manufacturing practices being the biggest threats to food safety. While the world struggles to improve water and soil quality, food safety practices throughout the production and supply chain stages can significantly improve the quality of food safety. Furthermore, with the help of technology, organizations have the power to revolutionize how we consume food by making it safer and reducing food-related diseases.
Foreign unwanted materials in food products present the biggest threat to consumers. Therefore it is imperative to make sure food products are contaminant-free. As a result, manufacturers must have quality checking and foreign body inspection mechanisms for their production lines.
Identifying the causes of foreign material
To avoid the cost of an audit to discover foreign material contamination, manufacturers should prevent such contamination at the source itself. Unfortunately these are some of the most common causes of food contamination.
Food processing and manufacturing contaminants
Processed food like meat products risks inedible animal parts like bone mixing in with the finished products. Other food processing and manufacturing contaminants can include machinery parts like bolts, chemicals and unwanted debris.
Agriculture
Harvesting machines are causing more damage to crops than they should be. A harvester cuts crops by rolling over them, and because the crop is soft, the wheels slip and dig into the crop. The machinery used by harvesters can damage crops, pull up stones and animal waste, and cause other problems.
Food distribution
When food is transported from the producer to the retail. Like insect infestation is a significant concern for food distributors. Some insects can destroy an entire shipment of food by chewing.
Wood shipping pallets
Wood shipping pallets are one of the most significant contributors to food contamination as they present a lot of unwanted pieces of wood and metal. Wooden pallets are made from natural, porous materials that easily splinter and decompose over time. Sharp wood debris can puncture packaging and contaminate products. When contamination occurs during mass production, manufacturers often have to throw out an entire product batch. The damage caused by pallet nails and screws often leads to financial losses and supply chain halts.
Foreign body detection solution for preventing foreign bodies
What is foreign body detection?
Digitalization and automated tools offer high-accuracy detection and quality checking to ensure products are entirely safe to consume. However many established and prominent manufacturers still have manual detection and quality-checking practices that are highly time-consuming and inaccurate.
Detecting foreign bodies throughout the different stages of food manufacturing through a machine vision camera is called foreign body detection. These cameras are programmed with a computer vision solution to detect foreign bodies that include metallic elements and non-metallic materials such as paper, cardboard, hair net, glass, etc.
This solution can be customized according to different production requirements. The solution is trained with different foreign body images and data sets. When cameras detect foreign material on the food processing conveyor belt, a rejection mechanism is triggered to eliminate the contaminated product from the production belt.
Next Steps
Are you facing food contamination issues in your food processing? You can chat with us. Our foreign body detection solutions will help you solve your contamination issues in a few weeks.
