Metal detection equipment in canned seafood production

Hello all

I had a disccusion recently with the quality manager of a canning industry and I would like to share it with you.

We were tlaking about the need of a metal detection equipment in a canned seafood industry? Should the answer be " NO" ? Should the answer be " go for a X-ray equipment" ??

I would like to know if some of you have seen this kind of equidment in a canned seafood industry ( squid, octopus, mussel ). If so, at what step is it placed ?
If not, what kind of risk assesment would you expect to see as an auditor ?

Thank very much for all your comments


Esther

Anyone care to comment on Esther's points?

Clearly, the potential risk of metal contaminant introduction should really be addressed prior to the can seaming rather than after the retort process. IMO, correct determination of CCP should therefore be addressed otherwise the HACCP Plan is incorrect.

I suppose it depends what your can is made of and where the risks are from. You can detect ferrous metal in aluminium but you won't detect any other metals (waste of time if your risks come from aluminium or stainless steel.) Will x-rays penetrate? If so, I suspect you will need a very high powered machine.

I think as Charles said, it's going to have to be before canning. You might need controls in the canning stage to prevent metal contamination there?

I have worked extensively in the canning industry, canning dairy desserts, and we did not have metal detection. However all cans were inverted and blown with compressed air immediately prior to filling.

The distance between the filling head and seamer was covered to prevent any ingress of foreign material.

We used seaming as the CCP as an inadequate seam could be potentially allow the ingress of bateria during the retorting process.

Also the amount of chlorine in the water was a CCP

The only time that we had a complaint from a customer regarding "metal shavings" in a can was when someone returned a spiral that had obviously come off the tin opener when an easy open end (ring pull) had been opened with a tin opener!

c x

I find the topic interesting as I have production of canned food in my factory.

From my point of view the big question is wether you have control of your rawmaterials or not. If the risk of foreign bodies is in the hands of a supplier I would most definatly have x-ray detection. If you supply all rawmaterials yourselves you can find other solutions.

Our production is the kind where we buy different components and put them together in a can. We experiance quite a lot of complaints from customers on foreign bodies, and find that most of them come in with our rawmaterials. Of course only some of them are possible to detect with x-ray detection (the foreign body must have a density greater than your product to be detevtable), but one complaint is one to many.... (finding pay pabck in the investment is difficult).

NB: the x-ray equipment exsists. I was in Cambridge, UK, just after Easter and tested Mettler Toledo's machine, and it was quite impressive. www.mt.com/safeline-xray
The machine for cans is called CanCheK. I will fight to get it on the investment budget for 2009. Another supplier of x-ray is Ishida (Italian company).

Hi all,

I just wanted to add some notes to this intersting discussion. To be up front and declare an interest - as one of the world's largest X-ray system suppliers many of the contaminants we have seen in cans comes from the incoming raw materials.

We have run some extensive on site trials using an Eagle Tall X-ray from my company; Smiths Detection, Product Inspection Division - www.smithsdetectionpid.com

For canning applications - alongside contaminant detection one added value we see is that the system can be used as a high speed checkweigher - before the retort and checking dry ingredients. The checkweighing uses the X-ray image to calculate the mass from the image. There are no moving parts so speeds can be upto 800 cans/minute and the cans can be literally touching. The results we have seen are better than +/- 0.5g for repeatable accuracy.

Stainless steel detection is from 0.8mm at 50% Probablity of Detection (POD) to 1.0mm stainless steel at 100% POD. In addition the systems also find stone down to 2.5mm (this depends on the density of course) and glass at similar levels (inside steel or alu cans). We also have a QuadView system, a four beam X-ray system for finding glass shards in glass containers, this of particular interest to baby food processors.

Smiths Detection has direct PID offices in the US and the UK where we have demonstration systems avalailable.

Thanks PI, it adds some balance to the MT information.

Welcome to the forums.

Regards,
Simon