Catching Foreign Material in Food with X-Ray Inspection

Food contamination caused by bacteria or chemicals gets most of the attention when it comes to news stories. In 2018, the main headline-grabbing contaminants were Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli—all three of which prompted recalls that included cheese products, salads, meats, and pet foods.

Because third-party X-ray inspection services are dedicated entirely to inspection, they operate at a much slower speed to allow technicians to monitor each item individually.

While recalls due to such bacterial contamination get a lot of attention, the fact is that the presence of foreign material in food continues to be a larger growing problem. It’s a significant enough problem that, on March 8 of this year, the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced a new guideline for the meat and poultry industry dealing with customer complaints in direct response to contamination from plastic, metal, and other foreign materials.

Those new guidelines require contamination incidents to be reported to the FSIS within 24 hours.

The government agency says it renewed its emphasis on responding to complaints of foreign materials following dozens of complaints and recalls last year due to foreign contamination in chicken, sausage, and other meat products.

Are Contaminants More Common, or Are We Better at Catching Them?

As the number of reported incidents continues growing, many consumers question what’s going on with the food supply. Are there more instances of contamination, or does our 24/7 news cycle just make sure we’re hearing about them?

The truth is, it’s probably a little bit of both. The industry has become more sophisticated in its ability to detect contaminants, whether they are biological, chemical, or physical. A September 2018 story on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition noted that then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottleib believed today’s food supply is safer than ever; what has changed is our ability to identify threats to our food and stop them from reaching consumers.

Preventing food contamination by foreign materials begins with understanding where the danger lies. There are a number of different ways for contaminants to enter the food supply, and as our food chain becomes increasingly global, those entry points continue to grow. Any time a new ingredient is introduced, from the field to the final stage of packaging, it also introduces a new opportunity for physical contamination.

Among the many sources of foreign contaminants in food products are pieces of manufacturing equipment, such as a blade, a wire, or a cracked gasket, that fall into the food. They can come from employees losing objects like an earring or a pen; a broken glass during packaging can also contaminate product. Or, it might come in the form of a rock or pieces of wood from where the food product or ingredient originated.

Further adding to contamination is the growing use of plastic materials. Today, plastic and rubber are two of the most common materials used in a food manufacturing plant—and while that makes the process easier for manufacturing in many ways, it has also created new headaches for food producers. Recently, two of the largest meat and poultry producers had to conduct recalls on their products, which totaled almost 100,000 pounds, due to rubber contamination.

Regardless of what type of physical contaminant it is or where the contamination occurred, the time to correct it is before that product hits the shelves and reaches consumers. Today’s increasingly sophisticated detection systems are designed to do just that.

Finding Foreign Materials in Food

Today’s food manufacturers have many choices when it comes to the type of equipment they use to safeguard their food. One of those options is X-ray inspection.