Controlling fragments of ingredients bags and other packaging material

Hello everyone!

We have had issues with small pieces of plastic and paper from our bags of ingredients ending up in our batches. We have addressed this mainly through cutting practices (sharp knife, single cut etc) but have not been able to eliminate the problem. Our ingredients and process require us to open and empty a LOT of bags, both wet and dry. Also, our products contain large size particulates (up to 1/2 inch) so screening/filtering isn't really an option.   

Has anyone seen or used an engineering solution for this problem? 

Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Thanks, in advance!

Rich

Intead of Plastic or Paper bag can you go for Aluminium Bag.

If you have a metal detector in your process, it will detect the aluminium bag piece.

That is something I can look into. We could change the bags that we use internally but it may be difficult to get all of my ingredients into metallic bags. We also have had difficulty detecting aluminum pieces that are very small. Thanks for the idea!

That is something I can look into. We could change the bags that we use internally but it may be difficult to get all of my ingredients into metallic bags. We also have had difficulty detecting aluminum pieces that are very small. Thanks for the idea!

 Sounds like you might want to get your metal detector company in to check the sensitivity and settings of your metal detector. They should be able to find optimum settings that won't give you false rejections while also being sensitive enough to find small pieces of aluminum.

Add a screen where you dump the bag into.  I've worked in dairies mostly and we use a liqwifier (very large blender) that has an opening at the top of about 2 feet in diameter.  We've always had screens made that could hook onto sides of the opening and stay in place while we dump our bags, but can also be removed and cleaned as needed.

Another facility I was at used kettles with very large openings.  On these it was more challenging, but we made it work with a screen that could hook over the side and be removed when not needed.  Since we dealt with different types of ingredients with different size particulates we had 5, or maybe it was 6, different screen hole sizes for each ingredient type that we would pour in.  Of course, we still had some issues of the plastic pieces with material that had fruit pieces.  We never really fixed this, but anytime we had customer feedback with plastic bag pieces our CEO would have us add a person to that customer's batches specifically to cut the bags properly everytime.  I always wondered why we just didn't fix the root problem of holding the operators accountable.  We had very good traceability and knew who made each batch and handled each ingredient at every step.  But hey..what do I know, I'm just the QA guy, right? :)

Just make sure if you go with the custom screens whoever makes the screens knows how to weld properly.  Otherwise you'll create more potential issues with metal fragments or difficult to clean screens (harborage).