Quality Control

Professional growers nowadays are supplying a large variety of plant species to their clients. A very labor-intensive process and in addition to the extensive audit work, it’s also a very error-prone process leading young plant propagators to expensive and often compromised solutions. That’s why TTA…

Color-coding as a quality assurance and safety measure has been on the rise since the passage of FSMA in 2011. Now, 10 years later, color-coding is being used in a wide range of industries from food manufacturers and processors to pharmaceutical developers and even brewers. As the popularity of the practice of color-coding has increased, so too has the market for color-coded tools. Nowadays, those in the industry can find virtually every high-quality cleaning tool under the sun, and a hygienic tools storage option for that tool in the color needed. The improved quality and availability of these products is wonderful, but nice tools alone cannot ensure a successful color-coding plan. Color-coding compliance is only possible when there is team-wide buy-in. That means meeting the team where they are—making the plan important to every single employee who steps onto a production floor. To do that, it needs to be introduced in an inclusive manner. The following are some tips for creating and implementing an inclusive color-coding plan.

Hyperspectral imaging may not sound the sexiest of subjects. But this rapidly emerging technology is promising to help the food industry gain ground in a host of areas, from quality assurance, pathogen detection and farm management.

500Foods shared this story from FoodSafetyTech.

For a long time, companies could effectively run food safety programs using only manual methods of quality management, such as pen, paper, spreadsheets and emails. Those practices have served the food industry well, but it was only a matter of time before food safety and quality management systems became mostly an exercise of technology.

The bar is set high when it comes to quality of fresh produce and continues to be gradually lifted. “To meet today’s expectations of buyers and consumers, it is important for quality checks to be done throughout all stages of the supply chain,” says Greg Akins, President of Catalytic Generators. The…

Compac’s UltraView produce inspection module has been recognized by the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards program as the 2020 winner of the Most Innovative Agritech Solution of the year.

UltraView was launched by Compac, which is part of the TOMRA Food family of companies, in late 2019.

UltraView maximizes the performance of Compac’s Spectrim, a powerful grading platform for fresh fruit and vegetables. UltraView’s advantage is its capability to reliably find defects in fresh produce that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to detect because of shape and/or location.

The UltraView module contains a set of high-resolution multi-spectral (color and infrared) cameras and LED lights which are located close to the fruit, parallel to its direction of travel. In this position, the UltraView cameras generate high-quality images for close inspection of the fruit’s stem bowl and tip regions.