Foreign bodies in meat: accurate detection

Inspecting meat product for foreign objects, versus finding them in dry, inert products, presents unique challenges. Meat has high “product effect”: conductive properties that can mimic a foreign object and cause the detector to incorrectly signal a physical contaminant. This false positive often necessitates a compromise in sensitivity to avoid false rejections.

Excessive false rejections also increase the potential for costly scrap or rework.

With temperature, salt content and product size changing during processing, product effect can vary, too, making consistent foreign object detection difficult (some examples of challenging meat applications are spiced and salted processed products, slices, sausage and moist or bloody whole muscle cuts).

In response to these complex needs, Thermofisher Scientific offers metal detectors that can compensate for product effect, and avoid any false rejection. One option is 5-frequency multiscan technology. It can find contaminants up to 50% smaller in volume than 1 or 2-frequency detectors, reducing the probability of an escape to near zero.

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