X-ray Inspection Prevents Food Quality Variations

Chips Ab catches flavoring lumps in cased product before it leaves the factory!

Making every bag of snack food look and taste as good as the last is a huge mass-production challenge. Random variations mean that sooner or later some bags will not match the standards set by the manufacturer. Luckily for Finnish snack-maker Chips Ab, x-ray inspection has put absolute consistency within reach.

Finland's number-one brand intends to stay number one
Finland's favourite brand of potato chips is Taffel. It's been the Finns' number-one brand since Chips Ab built Finland's first potato-chip factory on the island of Åland in 1969.

Like all successful food manufacturers, Chips Ab is driven by consumer needs and a fastidious attention to quality. "Continuous improvement is a way of life for us," says Christer Söderström, Technical Director and Factory Manager. "We monitor continuously. If a product doesn't live up to consumer expectations, we go back to the production line to find out why. Our rigorous approach has made us market leader in snacks within the Nordic and Baltic countries."

Nevertheless, one production problem has eluded Chips Ab: lumps of flavorings continue to turn up in bags of Taffel potato snacks and chips. "The obvious next step for us was x-ray inspection," says Christer. "Metal detectors cannot see the flavor lumps, nor can they handle our metallized bags."

An x-ray inspection system that can scan whole cases

Chips Ab's preferred location for x-ray inspection was the end of the line after the bags had been put in cases. Choosing an x-ray inspection system to meet that brief wasn't difficult.

Christer explains: "We looked at various x-ray inspection machines, but none had the ability to adapt to our needs, nor were they big enough to handle our size of case. Only METTLER-TOLEDO Safeline had exactly what we wanted. They took us to an existing customer site using an x-ray system specially designed to inspect large cases." After seeing how well it performed, Chips Ab ordered three CaseChek x-ray inspection systems. Two machines monitor production lines at Åland, the third is in a new factory near Riga in Latvia.

X-ray inspection identifies contaminants and quality variations

The CaseChek does two jobs at once. It detects contaminants (stainless steel from production equipment, glass and stone from the potato fields), plus it catches variations in product quality. Before the CaseChek's arrived, nothing stood between the manufacturing process and consumers. To gather data about flavouring lumps, Chips Ab staff had to analyse their customer complaints.

X-ray inspection changed all that. It put Chips Ab firmly in control of production quality. "Now we can monitor the size and frequency of the flavoring lumps. We use the data from the x-ray system to adapt our manufacturing processes to reduce and, where possible, eliminate the lumps."