Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Physical Contaminant Inspection

From ground beef to chicken breasts and salmon filets, physical contaminant inspection enhances meat, poultry, and seafood production processes by isolating foreign materials before they can adversely affect consumers, other equipment, and brand reputation.

CASSEL Inspection is an industry leader in physical contaminant inspection, designing customized inspection systems for commercial meat, poultry, and seafood manufacturers for more than 30 years.

Inspection systems empower food processors to enhance product quality and safety, confirm regulatory compliance, and avoid the economic and reputational damage that follows a product recall.

How is Metal Detection Used in the Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Industries?

High-sensitivity metal detection of meat, poultry, and seafood products is best achieved at or near the end of processing. Depending on the finished product, this might be,

• Post-cutting or -grinding: to eliminate any metal fragments or shavings from knives or grinder blades and plates.
• Pre-packaging: to remove contaminated products and avoid wasting packaging materials.
• Post-packaging: to ensure all packaged materials are free from metal contaminants.
• Pre-shipping: to confirm secondary packages are free of metal contaminants and ready for distribution.

Specialized metal detectors designed for food processing integrate seamlessly into any production line to allow for reliable, accurate inspection at any critical control point.

Metal detection in meat, poultry, and seafood products can be difficult due to compositional variabilities, like moisture, fat, and bone, and because of the conductivity of naturally occurring iron. Compositional variability and conductivity can “confuse” traditional metal detectors and these product effects can cause excessive false positives and product rejections.

To meet the challenges of product effect in this industry, advanced metal detection systems like Shark^TM Multisense^TM, have been designed to accurately and effectively detect foreign metal objects in even the most challenging meat and seafood products. These advanced machines can also withstand the demanding washdown requirements of food processing.

Bulk and Ground Ingredients

Meat, poultry, and seafood processors can use metal detection to ensure the safety of bulk ingredients produced for distribution or further processing.

For example, ground beef, poultry, or pork is often inspected immediately after grinding to eliminate any metal contaminants before packaging, forming, stuffing and clipping, or mixing with other ingredients. Similarly, chopped or minced fish is inspected to remove metal contaminants before mixing, forming, and breading processes.

Final Packaging

Post-packaging metal detection systems enhance consumer safety by removing any products containing physical contaminants. For wholesale applications, this step confirms the safety and integrity of each piece in a large-quantity package. For retail products, end-of-line metal detectors review every package, confirming product safety and regulatory compliance.