Hello Mohammed.
I will try and help as much as I can, I worked over 10 years in the canning industry, so am very familiar with your issues, but I have moved on to a different sector, so do not have access to documents used.
the canning test you mentioned mainly or only for the damaged or broken beans right?
The test was primarily a quality test to see that the beans were adequately softened without too much breakdown. It was intended to see the optimum hardness of water gave the best quality finished product. Sometimes breakdown was excessive and resulted in material rejection, similarly, rejection could occur because the product was still too firm after retorting. The soaking could also identify "non-soakers" which do not hydrate at all, and be another cause of rejection. There is a degree of trail and error.
It may be that your raw material performs differently to the ones we had. Kidney beans were North America, Peas were from UK (but were the most sensitive to water hardness and breakdown was common), White/navy/pea/haricot beans were from a number of countries.
1)what about the soaking efficiency?( my challenge is, even from approved suppliers, some beans soaking will finish before required time whereas some beans soaking will not finish even required time. So this case brine absorption will either become more or less. it will affect the final product. NB: All our raw beans are importing from various countries. so after bulk delivery, this is very big challenge to confirm these whole quantity are same specifications.
Good question. Batches of material will hydrate faster or slower then other batches. Less uptake of moisture in soak usually means greater uptake in retorting and stabilisation in the hours following retorting, and vice versa. You manage this by adjusting the fill weight into the can. The adjustment is based on an understanding of the target fill weight from the drained weight of finished product. We used to do a final product drained weight every 2 hours and adjust the fill based on the result. I would have thought you would have this data or are you a start-up factory?
2) what method are using for finding the size of the beans/foreign material, moisture, colour etc.?
The materials were pre cleaned before we received them using sieves and colour sorters. The main issue we had and pain most attention to, was removal of stones. The beans were water flumed from the soak tanks and in-line riffle plates removed any stones very effectively. I assume you are designed similarly, given the tonnages you mentioned. We had in-line colour sorters which the beans passed through, but these were removing black spots and blemishes not controlling colour. Colour we did not worry about. The only one which varied significantly was peas, which always had colour added to make them a uniform green.
3) For brine , which testing method(reference) are following? can you send me the testing procedure for the same?
Brix was simply by refractometer. Salt was standard analytical method for chloride titration with silver nitrate as in any chemistry test method book
4) Can you share me all the blank formats( raw material inspection, inprocess/brine analysis/ finished product analysis) which you are using in your lab? This will help me to establish an effective analysis system in place.
No longer available to me, as discussed. Raw material inspection was done on a 500 g composite sample (500 g approx. from each of 4 containers and mixed before dividing). This would be manually picked to determine foreign bodies, breakage etc and compared with your buying specification. Another 500g would be soaked as previously described.
Finished product analysis was not normally carried out apart from visual/taste. Nutritional analysis would be carried out annually for label declarations
I hope this additional information helps
Regards,
The Director