X-Ray Inspection Provides Product Safety For Ice Cream Production Lines

With a high volume of products being produced and dispatched to retailers across the region, Miko has always known that product safety is hugely important, both for its consumers and for the company’s reputation.

Seeking to further reinforce positive customer experiences, the company recently set itself the challenge of minimizing the already small risk of foreign body contamination to further reduce the number of customer complaints it received.

To initiate the project, Antoine focused on the Carte D’Or® ice cream tub lines, researching whether the risk of product contamination was primarily metal pieces, or if other contaminants could be involved as well. Once he established that there was also a small risk of glass, mineral stone or metal fragment contamination, it became clear that the product inspection solution must be capable of detecting a wide range of foreign bodies.

The technology would also need to offer sophisticated and variable product inspection analysis of the products being checked to avoid false rejects when checking fruit sorbets with large chunks of soft fruit or mistaking small hard chips of chocolate for a contaminant. Another piece to the puzzle would be the requirement that products could be inspected at varying levels of solidity, as some might have begun to defrost on the conveyor.

Mettler-Toledo Safeline X-ray’s InspireX2, designed for high-speed multi-lane applications and able to detect contaminants as small as 0.8mm, such as glass, metal, mineral stone and high density plastic was the solution they were looking for.