Peter Begg – Chief Quality and Food Safety Officer, Lyons Magnus
Watch this video to hear everything Peter had to say about working with FlexXray!
For more than 100 years, Lyons Magnus Ingredient Company has been a dedicated service provider to their customers in the foodservice and ingredient industries. As the Chief Quality and Food Safety Officer, Peter Begg oversees quality assurance programs at each of their facilities scattered throughout the United States.
Working with raw ingredients to provide fruit preps, syrups and sauces, Lyons Magnus is no stranger to foreign material—and they understand what it takes to keep potential issues at bay.
“In the space that we operate in, we order and buy a lot of fruit, and fruit has a lot of natural foreign material that comes in with it sometimes (stones, pits, seeds). We also buy a lot of processed fruit, which has a potential for foreign material, such as metals and other things, since it goes through its own processing.”
Foreign material detection systems are in place at their facilities, but those don’t necessarily catch everything. Peter understands that, which is why he’s worked with FlexXray repeatedly in the past.
“I’ve been in the industry for 30 years, and this is the third company I’ve been with where we’ve used FlexXray for various things. They have an excellent reputation.”
One example of FlexXray’s services that came to mind for Peter had to do with supplier monitoring and validation.
“In my last company, we had an issue with a supplier where we were finding foreign material on some of the incoming material. So, we set up a project with FlexXray where the supplier was required to send the raw material to FlexXray prior to shipping to us. We wanted to do a verification that we weren’t finding any additional metal in the raw material that was coming in.”
This project gave both Peter’s company and their supplier confidence and peace of mind.
“That was very successful. It really helped us feel more confident that there was no foreign material coming in. It also helped the supplier understand, when we did catch something, how they could get to the root cause and eliminate the foreign material.”
Production lines at Lyons Magnus run fairly fast, limiting detection capabilities in the case of foreign material contamination. Having FlexXray’s dedicated personnel and equipment at their disposal proved invaluable for Peter and his team. Product holds are inspected at a rate that allows for every single package or case to be detected and any potential foreign material contaminants to be captured.
“FlexXray has a ‘yes’ attitude, a ‘can-do’ attitude. They’re right there with the rest of the service providers that really help us keep our food safety and quality program strong. Whether it’s our labs for microbiology or some of our chemical providers for cleaning and sanitation, it’s just another tool we have at our disposal.”
When Lyons Magnus has an issue, they turn to FlexXray for a seamless process they can trust.
“They handle all the inbound and outbound logistics, and the reports come really quickly so that we can make a risk-based decision on the products that we’re buying. I really appreciate FlexXray and the partnership that they have with many of the companies in the food industry. They’re a valuable asset in the food safety program.”
