Industry: Supplements & Consumer Health
Product: Bulk Powders and Encapsulated Products
Foreign Material: Metal
The Product
A nutraceutical manufacturer in the DFW area produces bulk powders and encapsulated products across three production lines. Like most operations at this scale, each line runs inline metal detection as a standard part of the process. The detectors do their job well, but they’re positioned upstream of final packaging — before product reaches the foil-lined pouches that make up the majority of their capsule formats.
The Foreign Material Challenge
Foil blocks metal detection once a product is sealed. It’s a known limitation of the packaging, not a flaw in the equipment, and under normal circumstances it’s not a problem at all — the producer’s metal detectors have already done their work by the time product reaches that stage.
But during a routine quality check, the manufacturer’s team found a hole in a sifter screen further along in the process. The hole meant a piece of equipment that should have been intact was missing material. Fragments of metal wire had broken off and traveled into product along the manufacturing line, and that foreign material was now sealed inside the product.
That timing put the contamination on the wrong side of the manufacturer’s detection capability. Their inline detectors couldn’t be used on sealed product, and they had no X-ray or magnetic equipment on-site that could locate metal fragments inside foil. While they knew something had likely gone wrong, they had no way to confirm or understand the size of the potential foreign material event.
The Inspection Options
The manufacturer looked at handling the problem internally. They determined that reinspecting the affected product — unpackaging it, inspecting it by hand or by other means, and repackaging it — was estimated to take at least five full production shifts, at a large additional cost to the business.
With only three lines running, absorbing that workload would have meant losing the capacity of one line completely for more than a week. This would be a major disruption to their production schedule that went well beyond the cost of the shifts themselves.
And even after all of that time and expense, they still wouldn’t have had the equipment to verify the reinspection had actually found all foreign material. The same packaging constraint that ruled out their inline detectors in the first place would have applied just as much to any internal verification effort afterward.
How FlexXray Helped
The manufacturer called FlexXray, and both affected production loads — over 40 pallets, approximately 6,600 cases, representing an estimated $200,000 in product value — were received for inspection within 24 hours of that first call. X-ray inspection and contaminant retrieval on the full hold took about eight hours, and the manufacturer picked up their product the same day.
44
pallets
6.6k
cases
$200K
product value
Our inspection identified and retrieved 10 fragments of metal wire, which aligned closely with what the manufacturer had estimated was missing from the damaged sifter screen. The contaminants were located, counted, and removed, leaving the manufacturer with a documented basis for releasing the product with confidence.
All-in, the cost of third-party X-ray inspection didn’t even reach one-third of the internal rework estimate.
Learn more about FlexXray’s capabilities
About the Author
Kurt Westmoreland, Chief Commercial Officer
With more than 35 years of experience in the food safety space, FlexXray’s Chief Commercial Officer Kurt Westmoreland works to expand its market position in product hold resolution due to foreign material contamination. Throughout his career, Kurt has been an active member of several industry associations, including but not limited to: IFT, IAFP, AFFI, IPPE, BIFSCO, NAMI and several others. Through these associations and longtime corporate relationships, Kurt has built a reputation as a commercial and technical leader who is trusted by his many long-term clients to ensure they get the return on investment, answers and support needed to manage and improve their food safety and services programs.
