How product inspection helps combat rising manufacturing costs

How product inspection helps combat rising manufacturing costs
Photo - Mettler Toledo

Escalating manufacturing costs are proving a challenge to food manufacturers. Rob Rogers, Senior Advisor Food Safety & Regulation of Mettler-Toledo outlines how product inspection technology can help to mitigate the impact of cost pressures.

Inflationary pressures for Asian food manufacturers have been less severe of late than for those based in other parts of the world, but in both 2022 and 2023, they are still forecast to grow, according to figures from Asian Development Outlook released in September 2022.

The forecasts show a regional inflation rate of 4.5% (revised up from an April 2022 forecast of 3.7%) for 2022, while 2023’s expected regional inflation rate was increased from April’s forecast of 3.1% to 4% for the year.

As stated, these figures are much lower than those for economies such as the US and the Euro area, but the report highlights that they are also significantly higher than inflation rates experienced above across Asia in the period immediately before the COVID pandemic, suggesting, it says, that an increasing deviation from more normal price dynamics is occurring.

Focusing on solutions

Given the situation, how can food manufacturers look to combat rising input costs? One way is to focus their minds on efficiency, productivity, and waste reduction, and in this quest, product inspection technology will be a valuable tool. Everyone appreciates the importance of product inspection systems such as check weighing, metal detection, and x-ray inspection to comply with product quality and safety demands. There is another dimension to their purpose, though – one that is related to boosting productivity and controlling costs.

Accurate check weighing, for example, can ensure tighter production tolerances and reduce waste, helping food manufacturers to get the maximum yield out of expensive ingredients and raw materials, and improving cost performance. Checkweighing, with the correct controls, also helps food manufacturers to meet weights and measures legislation.

An ideal set-up would see a checkweigher equipped with highly accurate Electro-Magnetic Force Restoration (EMFR) load cells used in conjunction with feedback control and statistics software. This delivers precision weighing at high speeds and enables manufacturers to set precise fill levels for a pack to save raw material. Feedback control monitors the fill level and automatically communicates with the filling machine to ensure tight control. The statistics software records the fill level of each pack for audit purposes so that the manufacturer has proof of compliance with relevant weighing regulations, such as the Measuring Instruments Directive (MID).

The potential savings from operating in this way are substantial. For example, using a Mettler-Toledo C-Series check weighing system with FlashCell technology, a production line manufacturing one hundred 1kg packs of flour per minute across three eight-hour shifts per day could save almost 5kg of flour every day, if operating within strict MID regulations. If the manufacturer is not required to comply with MID regulations, the saving could be 1,170kg per day, based on a 10g per pack allowed underfill. In the course of a 300-day production year, this equates to more than 350,000kg of flour, costing more than €185,000 at a wholesale price of €0.53 per kg. The message is that on a fast-running production line, being able to set tight fill levels can equate to substantial raw material savings throughout a production run.

Photo - Mettler Toledo

Inspection technologies

Modern metal detection systems incorporate numerous features specifically developed to help users to reduce manufacturing costs. Among these are facilities such as Reduced Test Mode and Automatic Test Systems, which enhance productivity by requiring fewer or less labor-intensive production stops. This improves productivity, reduces downtime, and reduces waste.

In addition, food manufacturers can use modern metal detection technology with product clustering software, which enables multiple different products to be inspected on a single setting, so there is less need for costly product changeovers and stoppages.

Gravity fall and pipeline metal detection systems are particularly useful at the raw ingredients stage of food manufacturing, inspecting bulk volumes of material such as granules and powders, or slurries and pastes respectively, at high speeds. These also incorporate high-speed reject devices that efficiently remove metal-contaminated ingredients from the production line.

Similarly, x-ray inspection can also be used with bulk volumes of unpackaged products, removing contaminated ingredients before further value-adding processes are carried out to manufacture the product. This can save a great deal of waste and cost further along the line, reducing the number of manufactured products that need to be rejected, as well as the time and labor costs involved in dealing with such production interruptions.

Even with packaged products, x-ray inspection can also save costs, by inspecting and rejecting single contaminated products, instead of having to reject entire multi-packs when only part of the pack is contaminated. As well as the food waste here, there is packaging material waste too – another input cost that manufacturers need to keep control of.

Energy Consumption and Digitalisation

Two further aspects should be highlighted. The first of these is in the critical area of energy consumption. Investing in the latest product inspection machinery delivers an immediate and ongoing benefit for users, through these being highly energy efficient. For example, the latest generation of x-ray systems from Mettler-Toledo Safeline use as little as a fifth of the energy consumption rates of other solutions. We calculate that, based on a saving of 5 kWh per day and running 300 days a year, a manufacturer could save 1.5 MWh per year with a single x-ray machine, thereby reducing energy bills and enhancing the company’s environmental credentials.

The other factor to consider is the impact of the automatic collection and storage of production line data using the latest product inspection systems. Manual, paper-based collection of this data requires an employee to spend time that could be used more profitably on other tasks. It is also prone to mistakes, and there is a danger of records being lost or misplaced.

Compare this to automatic data collection, which is always accessible, accurate, and up-to-date, and can be trusted as a basis for standards compliance. It can also provide insight as to how and where efficiency and productivity can be further improved, with the potential for time and cost savings.

While it is true that digitalization is not without its costs in terms of investment in new or upgraded systems, the potential efficiencies that can be gained from the latest technology result in a comparatively quick return on investment. Additionally, improved maintenance and support provision leads to reduced downtime and more hours of optimal machine performance.

In conclusion, the battle against rising costs is a constant one for food manufacturers, and this year it has certainly become even more pressing. Increasingly, they need to find smart solutions, and a renewed look at product inspection technology can certainly help them to mitigate spiraling manufacturing costs.

Join on a live webinar on the 17th November to discover how product inspection technology can help to combat rising food manufacturing costs. Register here: www.mt.com/pi-combatcosts

Metal detection technology helps Jewel Date realize cost savings

Jewel Date had a manufacturing challenge with its old product inspection system that was costing days of production time and high energy costs. The producer of whole dates, date butter, date sugars, and date pastes was having to freeze its date paste in 18 kg bulk packages before inspection because the existing system could not handle hot paste. The result was a five-day delay, complicated logistics, and a great deal of extra energy use.

Its solution was to install the Mettler-Toledo Profile Advantage Pipeline metal detection system, which can handle hot paste. With no need to freeze bulk volumes, rejected paste now comes in much smaller quantities, and the delays and logistical issues have been eliminated. The company has realized massive productivity gains and cost savings, says Steve Luicci, Operations Manager, “The Profile Advantage system saves us an enormous amount of time, labor, and utilities. I can’t begin to imagine how much time and money it has saved. Most importantly, it’s twice as sensitive as our previous system and has almost no false rejects.”

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