Traceability and Product Inspection of Baby Food: Assuring Safety, Quality and Transparency

Product contamination through foreign bodies

Foreign bodies such as glass fragments, metal particles, stones, bone and plastic pieces can lead to baby food contamination during production. The contamination sources are very varied and are often process-specific. For example, glass fragments are more likely to be found in products packaged in glass containers, such as jars or bottles, stones may appear in grains and bones could be found in meat puree. 

Product underfill.

Anything can happen in the production process – a product dispenser gets clogged, and the juice pouch isn’t filled properly. Whereas an overfill results in an economic disadvantage on the part of the manufacturer, a product underfill can lead to fines, lawsuits and loss of consumer trust. Consumers and legislators expect volumes and product weight to match those indicated on the label.

• Incomplete product.
  When a product or some component is missing in a package, consumers aren’t pleased. A typical example is a missing measuring spoon in baby formula, a cap on a pouch or a lid on a food jar.  
   
• Product tampering concerns.
  Supply chain loopholes give food forgers a chance for fraudulent activities. These can take many forms, but once a suspicion arises, manufacturers have to recall their products, like in the above-mentioned case that happened in the UK at the beginning of 2020 ³.

_{³ www.foodsafetynews.com/2020/01/baby-food-recalled-in-uk-due-to-tampering-fears/}

Product recalls are damaging to any organisation, as they involve financial losses, extra resources and lead to negative publicity. The economic impact of a product recall on a company is enormous. It causes not only direct costs related to refunding, reverse logistics, product destruction and additional labour, but also indirect ones concerned with the damage to brand identity and loss of consumer trust. 

However, it is possible to avoid costly product recalls by improving product quality control through baby food inspection that detects product contamination before it’s too late.

X-ray inspection systems from Wipotec can eliminate a broad range of food safety and product quality issues through: 

• Foreign body detection 
• Fill level control 
• Identification of missing or damaged products or components 
• Ensuring proper sealing of canned food 
• Glass detection in glass jars or bottles
• Weight, mass and volume check

Achieving accurate product weight is one of the essential legal requirements for food manufacturers. Fill volumes or product weight must match those stated on the label. Product underfilling or overfilling can lead to litigation and consumer complaints or lower profit margins due to continuous product giveaway. 

However, reducing fill variation and achieving the target weight consistently is made possible by integrating checkweighing systems into a food production line. 
 

To avoid the risk of product underfilling, some product manufacturers put up with slight content overfill even though it does not pay off in the long run. Consider a pack of infant formula product with a 500-gram nominal weight and retail price of $2.00 per 100 grams. The product is manufactured at a rate of 50,000 bags per week, 50 weeks per year. Consequently, the factory produces 2,500,000 bags per year. The savings generated by a simple 1 gram reduction in giveaway per bag can save 2,500 kg of product annually, or $50,000 in lost revenue per year. Since baby food is a relatively expensive product, installing a checkweigher for inline weight inspection will very soon return the investment.