I N D U S T RY TA L K
Are you ready for
product scrutiny?
Quality inspection is especially critical in food and beverage manufacturing and packing. Preventing defective products from entering the supply chain not only saves time and money but also prevents product recalls and potentially expensive legal costs.
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n unreadable barcode or incorrect expiry date can result in perfectly good products being recalled and discarded. Clear markings are a top priority for all food and beverage products owing to increasingly strict legislations. The Consumer Protection Act was implemented to prevent exploitation or harm to consumers by regulating the way in which businesses interact with consumers and market their products and services. Packaging and labelling must now adhere to certain standards. Food Labelling Regulations (R146) were also introduced to ensure a standardised approach among all food and beverage manufacturers. As production lines become more automated, inspection and quality control need to follow suit. These types of systems can improve a line’s effectiveness, by performing tasks quickly and accurately. The real benefits materialise when ‘smart’ automation is implemented, using features such as smart data. Applied to vision inspection systems, defects can be spotted and dealt with swiftly with minimal impact to a line. A smart vision inspection
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Packaging Review | October 2018
Tiger Brands, and Rainbow, a division of RCL Foods. The Consumer Goods Council of South Africa (CGCSA) confirms that retailer and manufacturer members already adhere to the strictest hygienic and food safety standards, regularly monitored by the Department of Health. ‘Our concern is always the health system can make any production line more of consumers and our members efficient and less wasteful. This is both in will not compromise on this nonterms of capacity and down time. negotiable requirement. CGCSA members have ongoing routine QUALITY CONTROL PERTINENCE testing schedules in place to monitor all All production lines can face challenges food products for pathogens and take with inspection and quality control. action if these organisms are detected. However, it’s important to avoid The members have, as a result of the latest mistakes at all costs in the food and outbreak, taken additional precautionary beverage industries. measures to ensure the safety of food The negative effects of defect products sold to consumers. products reaching the public Omron’s systems cover all parts domain can be far reaching, of the production line, including with a product recall quality inspection. Whether affecting everything providing a complete system from consumer health to solution or a partial upgrade The listeriosis brand confidence. to an existing system, each outbreak earlier this The listeriosis component is geared year claimed more outbreak is an towards ensuring the highest than 200 lives. unfortunate example. The quality control. news of the foodborne For inspection and quality disease was made public in control, the compact visual March by the Minister of Health, inspection units monitor production Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. This followed the in real time and respond instantly to any National Consumer Commission’s (NCC) defect. Data sent from the vision system order to recall processed meat products is processed locally and sent via the cloud manufactured by Enterprise, a division of for powerful analysis, allowing the system
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