Bulking up HACCP Safety Standards
An annual HACCP assessment helps ensure essential inspection points are covered and that the facility remains compliant for retail and food service.
July 15, 2024
Catching contaminants at the start of any bulk ingredient, grain, snack, confectionery, or pet food processing line is the most cost-effective solution. However, it is critical to assess and regularly review production risks in context. Ensuring there are no HACCP gaps and that all the essential inspection points are covered.
Eric Garr, regional sales manager at Fortress Technology, examines the benefits of having a longer-term strategic investment plan and identifies the hidden and frequently overlooked risks on bulk food processing lines.
Bulk food production costs have seen some stabilization in the past couple of years. Even so, labor, transportation, and warehousing real-estate costs remain high compared to pre-pandemic. Making it even more imperative that any new manufacturing investments add value. Potential issues can be safeguarded, and ROI can be increased by being strategic when selecting high contaminant risk checkpoints and inspection equipment.
Whenever there is a change in a process or packaging, bulk processing QA professionals should revisit inspection protocols and hypothetical contamination scenarios to look for potential holes in the value chain. Even when there’s no significant change, food processing inspection risks should be reviewed annually as part of a defined HACCP assessment.
Foreign Object Fears
There are three major sources that can introduce contaminants into bulk dry food processing lines: foreign matter present in incoming raw ingredients; wear and tear from processing machinery; and workforce risks, including health and safety handling risks and poor construction and maintenance of production facilities and equipment.
Potential contaminants can range from metal flakes to more dangerous metal fragments. If these larger contaminants aren’t detected at their largest potential size, smaller pieces can end up being dispersed throughout an entire batch of processed product. These larger contaminants can also potentially damage processing equipment, resulting in downtime, expensive repairs or even machinery replacements.
Metal remains the most likely contaminant on all food processing lines. This is typically due to high levels of automation in production plants. If processing equipment is not properly maintained and monitored. This augments the risk of metal fragments entering a production line.
Often mounted at height, accessing gravity metal detectors to perform equipment tests can be challenging without an automated solution (Fortress Technology)
Built to Handle Bulk
Often located between product chutes and hoppers on bulk production lines, large gravity metal detectors allow product to flow directly through the aperture. As product passes through the detector aperture, contaminated product is removed using a high-speed reject mechanism, such as a diverter valve.
End-of-line bulk checkweighing and contamination inspection technology can be utilized after the product is packaged and sealed. Functioning as a final safeguard, at this phase there is virtually zero possibility of a new contaminant being introduced. However, if rejected, the costs incurred as a result of wasted food, labor and packaging can be exponentially higher.
Establishing the biggest contaminant risks and most cost-efficient CCPs and inspection solutions all help to ensure a robust HACCP-compliant food safety strategy. Delivering maximum profitability and avoiding costly waste.
Reducing Returns
Before any processing occurs, bags of bulk ingredients weighing up to 110 lb can be inspected using large bag metal detectors. Bulk processors should look for systems that feature heavy duty conveyor belts, highly sensitive metal detection apertures sized to match large bag applications, and extra-rugged outer casings to suppress loud industrial equipment vibrations and noise that could interfere with signals and lead to false rejects.
“Scanning raw ingredients as they come into the factory is prudent for many reasons, said Garr. “Although in most instances these ingredients would be inspected by the supplier, a re-inspection will help to ensure that suppliers are complying and hold them accountable for ingredient quality.”
Safety at Heights
“Upstream inspection often make it easier to detect contaminants, trace to their source and potentially alert staff to equipment failures before they potentially trigger huge recalls,” said Garr.
Due to the safety risks on gravity lines, automatic testing is increasingly being utilized. Replicating a metal contaminant signal disturbance in the center of the aperture, one of the key benefits of automatic testing is food safety and QC standards are maintained, in many cases improved upon, without compromising production speeds. The results from tests are automatically logged and digitally stored for GFSI audits. In addition to reducing operational costs, automatic testing is proven to reduce waste and product rework.
Manually performing these regular performance verifications on gravity metal detectors can be especially time consuming. Mainly due to the challenges of accessing machinery positioned at height. “It is virtually impossible to repeatedly and accurately replicate a metal contaminant passing through the exact center of the product flow, within the aperture, in enclosed free-flowing gravity applications,” said Garr.
With many gravity metal detectors located near product silos above production lines, climbing up to perform this task manually is usually a two-person task and carries some potential safety risks.
To comply with global weights and measures regulations, large bag wholesale and food service products packed to a set weight also need to be verified. A checkweigher can be integrated with both metal detectors and X-ray using a conveyor configuration to ensure each product meets the nominal weight.
The ability to configure a conveyor reject collection system and select a reject option to suit plant layouts, e.g. belt-stop-alarm, heavy-duty kickers or an overhead sweep, further boosts the efficiency of bulk inspection machines, according to Eric.
HACCP guidance states that critical control points (CCPs) should be located at any step in the process where hazards can be prevented, eliminated, or reduced to acceptable levels. “Rather than looking for patterns, examine potential CCP-holes. This is even more critical if a production process or packaging is changing,” said Garr.
An annual HACCP assessment--a requirement for most bulk processors and ingredient suppliers--will help to ensure all essential inspection points are covered and, most importantly, that the facility remains compliant for retail and food service.
Eric Garr is regional sales manager at Fortress Technology (Toronto, ON, Canada). For more information, call 416-754-2898 or visit fortresstechnology.com.
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