The Ticket to Quality and Safety

Optimising your metal detection system

- Siddharth Kachroo

When dealing with products intended for human consumption, like foods and pharmaceuticals, every care must be taken to ensure that they meet the highest safety standards possible. It is simply not an area where brands can afford to take any risks, or gamble with their reputations.

Due to their impact on consumer health, harm to brand reputation and the financial implications of legal proceedings, even minor quality shortcomings in the production process can be hugely damaging, perhaps irreversibly so for consumer brands. Product recalls are a particularly embarrassing and costly outcome for a producer to endure. The detection of hazardous foreign objects, such as ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals and stainless steels, is hence an area of massive importance.

The latest food and pharmaceutical industry trends show that consumers, whilst attracted by low prices in uncertain financial times, are nonetheless increasingly drawn to product safety and quality re-assurance . It is vital that brands find a cost-effective way to meet these contemporary demands and advanced metal detection systems provide a solution.

A necessary process

“Every company needs to perform a hazard analysis for every product it produces to assess the risk of metal contamination in their products. If the hazard analysis shows there is a risk of metal contamination, then, a metal detector will be required.” British Retail Consortium (BRC) - Global Standard Guidelines

An optimised metal detection programme is not a matter of choice for food and pharmaceutical producers – it is a matter of legal necessity.