ONE of the largest premium flour and ingredient companies in North America – Ardent Mills – recently implemented automatic testing on several of its conveyor Fortress Technology metal detectors.
A number of the company’s packaging lines are now also using digital reporting to enhance efficiency, food safety and traceability.
Comprising over 40 locations producing flour, quinoa and pulses, organic and gluten-free products, Ardent Mills embraces digital technologies to ensure every aspect of its operations remain true to its quality standards. Processing around 22.4 million bags of packed milled product annually, over the last 12 months packaging engineer Manvine Bharj and her team, supported by local Fortress food safety specialists, has set up Halo Automatic Testing on six inline conveyor packaging lines.
At the mills that ship packed product direct to retailers and commercial bakeries, Ardent implements an end-of-line HACCP testing point, just before palletising. “We intentionally test our inspection equipment more often than our customers’ conformance requirements stipulate, as it provides extra quality assurance and fills us with confidence that our products are the safest they can be,” Manvine explained.
Activating the technologies pre-installed on the Halo Ready Fortress metal detectors has proven to be an ‘efficiency and safety game-changer’ for many of the mills’ quality managers. Fortress said the operational savings have been ‘equally rapid’.
Manvine estimates the ROI on the original Stealth metal detector investment has been achieved in six months or less. “Halo provides the perfect blend of inspection continuity, contaminant detection, machine performance and safety,” she added.
Like many mills and bulk processors, one of the greatest challenges when performing repeatable manual tests is the time and labour required and simulating the same conditions for each test. UK sales director Phil Brown said, “Manual testing in milling environments often requires placing a test sample in the exact middle of each grain bag, passing this through the metal detector, removing it from the line, opening the packaging and removing the test sample, and inspecting it again. Testing all three metals, every two hours is a lot of heavy lifting, sifting, repacking and potential waste. Not to mention, replicating this test manually is extremely challenging to do accurately.”
Halo Automatic Testing independently tests all three metals in the exact geometric centre of each Stealth metal detector aperture. The techn then mimics the disturbance caused by a test contaminant calibrated to the precise size, metal type and speed of each product bag as it passes through the metal detector aperture.
“With automated tools like Halo and Contact 4.0 we are proactively preventing issues for our team members, all while improving customer service and overall food safety,” said Manvine.
To distinguish between a real metal detection reject and when a Halo test is being performed, the milling business requested one customisation – a blue light system to alert operators when a test is running.
“This feature alone has made a huge impact on our labour demands and potential product waste,” Manvine added. “Without this blue light we would have to either sift and rework every 50lb test sack assuming it was contaminated, or simply reject and waste it. That could have added up to re-inspecting 12 sacks, 600lbs of flour, per line, every shift.”
With many sites moving towards paper-lite processes, automating QA documentation has helped maximise equipment and operator efficiency.
As a web-based networked system, Contact 4.0 allows operators to monitor multiple metal detectors. “Our quality managers loved Contact 4.0 as soon as it was implemented,” Manvine stated. “As a networked system, it’s so easy to go into the centralised browser, select and email shift reports and view when tests were performed. Having this complete oversight allows them to immediately address issues and ensure the inspection process doesn’t cause a bottleneck.”
