Food safety is extremely topical, both for consumers and manufacturers. Protection against product recalls is driving manufacturers to incorporate product inspection into their processing and packaging lines. While an inspection step is a critical requirement for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) and most likely needed for Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) compliance, before committing to a solution, it is important to establish what to look for in a product inspection system. With a multitude of options available on the market, it can be confusing to select a technology that will be the right fit for a production line. Furthermore, advanced inspection technologies can offer much more than contaminant detection, currently pushing the frontiers into total quality assurance.
A traditional form of inspection used before technology became popular was manual inspection. An appropriate method in the past, manual inspection presents many challenges that have made it unsuitable for food manufacturing including identification of contaminants only visible to the human eye, lower throughput speeds and inherent worker safety risk created by manually removing contaminated product from the line. It is critical to consider hazards that can be seen, such as a packaging defect that compromises the safe, airtight seal of the package or a foreign body contaminant protruding from a product but also those that are contained within the product.