Industry: Ready to Eat and Packaged Food
Product: Retail Brownie Mix
Foreign Material: Metal
The Challenge
Most QA teams running their own X-ray equipment set the calibration and leave it alone going forward. It rarely comes up for discussion again unless a specific need arises.
In this case, a manufacturer of packaged dry goods had an in-house X-ray line calibrated to detect 1.5 mm ferrous metal and 2.5 mm stainless metal. This internal standard was sufficient for their needs — but when they started working with a new major retailer partner, those needs changed. They now needed to inspect for even smaller contaminants, and they didn’t have the in-house equipment to do that with confidence.
15,000 cases of product suspected for foreign material contamination were sitting on hold in their facility, with a disposition date locked in place.
The Solution
What this customer needed was X-ray inspection at a lower sensitivity threshold, with contaminant retrieval included. Those are standard FlexXray services — the real challenge in this case was time. Inspection reports needed to be back the same day product was processed, with nothing held overnight.
FlexXray was able to complete the inspection within the needed timeframe, and handled something beyond the inspection itself: instead of distributing product back to the manufacturer for repacking, the team configured pallets on-site to distribution floor-ready specifications and shipped the product directly from our facility to their distributor. That removed a full leg of handling the manufacturer would otherwise have needed to manage on a deadline with no time to spare.
The moving target most manufacturers will face:
What this project actually exposed wasn’t a failing piece of equipment. The manufacturer’s X-ray system was performing exactly as calibrated — it had simply been locked in before this particular requirement existed. That’s a gap that can’t be solved by replacing a line on short notice.
Working with FlexXray allowed this manufacturer to save more than $475,000 worth of product from the landfill, meeting all deadlines in the process. That’s the value of having a partner on call and available to inspect your product immediately.
Learn more about FlexXray’s same-day inspection capabilities
About the Author
Kye Luker, Chief Product Officer
Kye Luker serves as the Chief Product Officer at FlexXray, where he leads the development of innovative X-ray and CT inspection processes and technology. With over two decades of experience in the service, CPG, food, and beverage industries, Kye brings a wealth of knowledge in continuous improvement, quality assurance, and formulations to his role.
