Snack Food Inspection

Over 90% of adults in America report consuming one or more snacks every day. From candies to crackers, fruits to nuts, chocolates, cheese, crisps, or chickpeas, contaminant inspection systems improve product safety, ensure operational efficiency, and protect brand integrity.

CASSEL Inspection understands the unique challenges facing snack food manufacturers and provides customized inspection system solutions suitable for any stage of production.

From raw ingredients on their way into a production facility to packaged products on their way out, physical contaminant inspection systems help ensure quality and safety, while avoiding the financial and reputational impacts of a product recall.

How is Metal Detection Used in the Snack Food Industry?

Metal detectors are versatile tools that fit seamlessly into virtually any stage of a production process. Ideally, metal detection is used at several critical control points to provide initial, ongoing, and final safety checks.

Incoming bulk ingredients should be inspected to confirm raw materials are free of foreign materials introduced during harvesting, storage, or shipping to the processing facility.
Production line inspections eliminate material contamination during processing steps such as measuring, mixing, cooking, and packaging.
Packaged product inspection provides a final check that ensures maximum safety and quality before products leave the processing facility.

Bulk Ingredient Inspection

Snack food manufacturers can use specially configured metal detectors to inspect bulk raw materials such as grains, vegetables, nuts, dried fruits, and spices.

A gravity feed metal detector, also called a drop-through metal detector, can inspect flour, sugar, or other free-flowing powders exiting a storage hopper and reject any material containing metal contaminants.
Conveyor belt metal detectors can be designed to accommodate two- to four-foot-wide belts with material stacked up to five inches high.

Advanced metal detection systems may be tailored to meet production volume needs, but it’s important to note: less product moving through the detector allows for higher sensitivity inspection.

Learn more about how conveyor belt metal detectors and gravity-feed metal detectors work to reduce contaminants in bulk ingredients.

Snack Foods Pump Feed Inspection

Pump feed metal detection is ideal for snack food fillings, frostings, and other fluid products such as milk, condiments, chocolate, nut butters, fruit, oils, syrups, vegetable purees and candy mixtures.

Manufacturers working with low- and high-viscosity materials at temperatures up to 203°F (95°C) can utilize customized pipeline or pump feed metal detectors readily adaptable to common piping systems. These unique systems continuously test products moving through the pipeline and remove contaminated material using a rapid-response ejection mechanism, saving money and resources otherwise lost to rework and packaging for products rejected later in the process.

Interested in how pump feed inspection works on fluid products in motion? See the key product details now.

How Is X-ray Inspection Used in Snack Food Manufacturing?

X-ray inspection provides solutions to several challenges unique to snack food production.

Snack food plants, like almonds, undergo minimal processing from field to shelf. Nuts can be conveyed through an X-ray system in a one- or two-inch layer to isolate stones, rocks, glass, or other field-related contaminants.

Additionally, snack foods are commonly packaged in metalized films: a thin layer of metal bonded to a packaging film. While ideal for extending shelf life and enhancing product appearance, metalized films interfere with metal detection systems, making X-ray ideal for reliable inspection of common snack food packages.

X-ray is also commonly used as a final check for contamination of secondary packaging as well. For example, a large box of individually-sized packages. A bolt that has fallen into a carton of smaller packages doesn’t pose a health risk to consumers but it could adversely affect brand reputation.

Raw Ingredients

Root crops such as peanuts, as well as pistachios, almonds, and other tree nuts are snack food products which are highly susceptible to contamination from the field. Additionally, contamination can occur at many points in production. For example, physical contaminants may be introduced by harvesting equipment, holding and shipping containers, or packaging systems.

X-ray inspection can isolate hazardous contaminants, including metal, stone, glass, ceramic, and plastic. Eliminating foreign materials before they enter the production stream ensures finished product safety, minimizes downtime by preventing equipment damage, and improves cost efficiency by eliminating costs associated with finished product rejection (e.g., wasted production time, ingredients, packaging materials, rework, etc.).

How Are Checkweighers Used in the Snack Food Industry?

Checkweighers are inline systems for continuously measuring the weights of packaged products and rejecting any packages that are outside of a specified weight range. Checkweighers are critical compliance assurance tools as they remove underweight products that could trigger FDA action for mislabeling. Checkweighers also protect manufacturers from costly giveaway by removing overfilled packages.

Rejecting an underweight package of crackers, for example, could indicate that one or more crackers are missing, or that one or more cracker sandwiches are underfilled.

Similarly, rejecting packages of chocolate-covered raisins could indicate a problem with piece count or an issue with coating volume.

Checkweighers also ensure secondary packaging quality. An underweight rejection could indicate too few packages in the container, while an overweight rejection could indicate too many packages or the presence of a foreign object.

CASSEL Inspection metal detectors feature high stability performance and continuous self-balancing that eliminates the need for electronic balancing and ongoing troubleshooting, while proprietary XIA software and a touchscreen interface improve inspection quality, reduce false rejects, and facilitate documentation compliant with international safety and quality guidelines, including HACCP, IFS, BRC, and 21 CFR.

If you have questions about contaminant inspection for snack food applications, contact one of our technical experts today.

Snack Food Inspection