With the Winter Olympics in full swing, it’s a great time to think about how your solutions for foreign material contamination measure up to the competition. We mean this in two ways: (1) how are your methods measuring up to alternatives, and (2) how do your methods compare to leaders in the food industry? If you’ll indulge us, what follows are our “medals” for handling foreign material contamination.
Before we get to our “top medalists,” we want to talk about why we disqualified one of our “competitors.” Ignoring The Problem hasn’t been a serious contender for decades but keeps popping up in competition, despite numerous warnings from contest officials (the FDA & USDA FSIS) and consumers. This contestant puts your brand, consumers, and bottom line at risk. We highly recommend that you disqualify Ignoring The Problem from your pool of foreign material contestants.
While Disposal found its way to the gold medal in the 1990s and early 2000s, this method has steadily lost ground to the competition over the last two decades. Disposal is costly; it represents time, material and labor costs that can never be recovered. Further, it fails to meet the competitive standards of the 21st century. With ESG metrics (environmental, social and governance standards) as part of the scoring system for today’s food producers, the industry has shifted away from Disposal. While Disposal can be seen as eliminating risk, it is also adding to a much larger landfill waste problem. As the industry continues to focus on protecting profits and brand reputation and meeting external and internal ESG standards, we expect to see Disposal fall further and further behind the pack.
Over the last two decades, improvements to in-house, inline technology have made Rework a possible contender in the contest to overcome foreign material contamination. Food producers have increasingly adopted inline devices to improve accuracy, enhance the security of critical control points, and detect more foreign material contamination. This detection technology prioritizes speed, a considerable advantage over the competition. That said, Rework is not without limitations. Rework requires open line time or the delay of scheduled production and uses this in-house technology to copy the original process—which often doesn’t catch materials it missed the first time. These technologies are also usually tailored to one type of contaminant, limiting how versatile Rework can be.
Is it self-congratulatory to award ourselves the gold medal? It would be if we hadn’t chalked up more foreign material finds of more foreign material types than anyone in food production history. Through a unique combination of state-of-the-art technology and custom processes, we’re able to conduct x-ray food inspection that finds foreign material of every type with incredible sensitivities, and we’re able to repeat our success contest after contest. We’ve saved our industry-leading, household-name customers millions of dollars and public scrutiny by protecting brand reputations and preventing food from going to waste.
If you’re ready to work with the industry winner in resolving foreign material contamination, contact FlexXray today by emailing us or calling us. We look forward to you joining us on the podium!
