Technology Helps Reduce Food Processing Waste

Food products can become physically infected at any stage in the production chain. It could also be the case when fresh materials arrive at factories that are still holding physical toxins.

FREMONT, CA: While a zero-tolerance attitude to food safety threats is critical to shielding customers from foodborne disease and injuries, a relatively large volume of food can be lost by unoptimized inspection systems. Inferior food safety technologies can lead to food waste problems between traceability issues, product recalls, and false rejections.

Innovative contaminant identification and inspection technologies ensure compliance with stringent food quality requirements and minimize the amount of food wasted during processing. Following is how upgrading food safety facilities inside a production plant will help reduce food processing waste:

1. Early Detection of Contaminated Products

End-of-line product testing is a mandatory function of any food processing plant to guarantee that packaged goods are safe to continue their path down the supply chain. However, depending on end-of-line inspection alone to monitor the physical degradation of food items has many pitfalls. One such drawback is a larger volume of food waste.

Food products can become physically infected at any stage in the production chain. It could also be the case when fresh materials arrive at factories that are still holding physical toxins. Suppose there are no measures in place to identify contamination before the final step of development. In that case, the infected food commodity could have made a full journey through the manufacturing chain before being detected and discarded. In this case, it is not just the harmful substance that is being thrown out, but all the additional materials, energy, and services that have gone through its manufacturing up to that point.

Food purity is better ensured as food processing facilities adopt a complex, multi-tiered definition of food protection in which food products are tested at many important control points along the production line. By incorporating advanced detection technologies at strategic manufacturing junctures such as raw-ingredient intake and after mechanical processes such as pulverization, physical pollutants may be detected and discarded at the source. This instance not only offers more reliable statistics on the monitoring of toxins, but it also protects businesses from spending money on goods that can only be refused later and stops international actors from dispersing and contaminating more commodity batches.

2. Avoiding the Waste Associated with Food Recalls

Recalls for food products are on the rise worldwide. An inconvenient but also important measure, food recalls are needed to avoid disease and injury. Yet, the tradeoff is immense in terms of food waste. When food items are recalled, it is not all tainted products that are tossed out. Rightly choosing to rely on the side of caution, businesses and customers are tossing out a large amount of food that can potentially be healthy to eat. A single infected specimen entering the market could lead to the destruction of thousands of pounds of perfectly edible food items.

No food maker would like to recall a food product. Beyond the missing resources and the high costs of withdrawing goods from supermarket shelves, the company's image is severely hurt. Reliable food safety equipment is essential to avoiding patient harm, food waste, and the PR epidemic after a product recall.