Foreign Material Detection in Action on the Front Lines of Meat Processing

Anyone working in a meat processing plant knows that foreign materials are present. It’s the prevalence that’s a little harder to pin down.

As PPO’s Onboarding Specialist and Sales Engineer, Philip Hancock has seen many PPO customers experiencing their first foreign material detection “a-ha moments”. Now he’s sharing these stories in a quick video interview, along with some advice for dealing with foreign materials and his thoughts on FM detection trends. He’s also sharing visual foreign material examples that PPO’s Smart Imaging System has detected on the front lines of meat processing. 

Time to watch: ~ 13 minutes. Don’t have time? Skip straight to the highlights!

Foreign Material Detection Stories Video Highlights

FM inspection is hard on humans (8:28):

“Because we’ve all relied on humans to try to do this inspection. And [humans are] just not capable of doing that at the speeds that we’re running across the conveyors. It’s not possible. But when you see how much [PPO] actually takes out of the system, it’s pretty amazing. One of our customers even commented, “You know, this has always been here. We’ve just never been able to detect it. And now that we are, I sleep better at night.”  And I think that’s a really good compliment.” – Philip Hancock,  Onboarding Specialist and Sales Engineer at PPO

Zero foreign material incidents for 2+ years (9:32):

 “We wear rubber gloves, we wear cotton gloves, we have cardboard that we put product in, we have pallets we put product on. The chances of [foreign material contamination] actually occurring are not limited at all. They’re very much in front of your face. So, if you’re having a struggle with it, the first thing that I would do is make sure that you have as many of the processes that you can. We have several customers that use what’s called a “triple hurdle process” where they use an x-ray, a metal detector, and our Smart Imaging System. And between those three, downline they’ve had zero foreign material incidents for well over two years.” – Philip Hancock,  Onboarding Specialist and Sales Engineer at PPO

Foreign material recalls hurt the entire industry (10:58):

“There seems to be a lot more prevalence of foreign materials causing recalls. I know that a lot of the industry has been talking to one another and they have various seminars and they meet together and they discuss foreign materials – especially among the larger groups that actually have a brand to protect. And that, of course, is your confidence in food supply as a consumer is greatly related to not seeing recalls for any reason. And so, foreign material recalls don’t just hurt whoever has the recall. They hurt the entire industry.” –  Philip Hancock,  Onboarding Specialist and Sales Engineer at PPO

Keep Learning with More Behind the Scenes Videos

Read a Transcript of Philip’s Interview

Jump to the section of interest: 

• Real-life Foreign Material Detection Stories
• “Aha FM Detection” Moments from Customers Using PPO’s System
• How Customers Are Using PPO Insights
• FM Inspection Epiphanies
• Advice for Dealing with Foreign Materials
• Foreign Material Detection Trends in the Meat Industry

Heather Galt: ​​Welcome to Behind the Scenes with PPO, a video series that looks at how meat processors are working with tech companies like PPO and why.

I’m Heather Galt, the Chief Customer Officer here at P&P Optica. And today, I’m joined by Philip Hancock, the Onboarding Specialist and Sales Engineer here at PPO.

Philip joined us after twenty-nine years in various roles, both in plants and corporate in the meat industry. And I can’t think of anyone better to talk to us today about some of the things that we’ve seen and learned in various meat processing facilities across Canada and the US.

Welcome, Philip.

Philip Hancock: Thank you.

Real-life Foreign Material Detection Stories

HG: Philip, let’s get started with a couple of good stories. I know you’ve been in lots of plants. You’ve seen lots of crazy findings. What are three of your favorite foreign materials finding stories since you started at PPO?

PH: Well, one that jumps out to start with is one we found literally the first day we turned the models on in a pork plant.

This is a secondary processor that makes a product that we all know well.

They turned it on, and it was about fifteen minutes into production. I was working with the supervisor in the office and an employee comes in and she’s wearing a brand new pair of green rubber gloves. And she’s complaining that the gloves have a hole in them already and she just got them that morning.

So, I gave her a new pair of gloves. She went back to the line and it was less than three minutes later, she came back and said, “I found the piece of glove.”

And, yeah, we just had a rejection and we identified it as a piece of small green rubber, but we were able to literally match that piece that was missing up with her glove. And, it made a believer out of her.

She’s probably one of the best employees we have now as far as looking to make sure there’s nothing in them because she knows how small it will find. That piece that she found was approximately two millimeters.

Another good one would be a processor that does chicken. And in their process they remove it from the box, they put it through the line and, for some reason, some of these boxes are taped.

Well, it was a couple of days into production and after the models had been turned on, and we found a piece of clear tape that we could actually identify. It’s a little scary to think that there was tape in the product…you certainly couldn’t find it with the human eye.

So it was really a neat catch and it really was something we didn’t even train the machine on. So it was a really nice capture for us as well as for them, and it gave them a lot of confidence that the machine was working well.

In another place they used frozen chicken. And so frozen chicken breast comes in a cardboard box. It’s wax-lined in this case, and then they run it through a grinder before they send it to a secondary grinder and [the PPO Smart Imaging System is] between the two [grinders]. And in doing that, there were several days that we have seen that, as they unbox it and run the product through the grinder, they’re finding pieces of cardboard.

Of course, it goes through the grinder and ends up in three or four pieces. But, what’s been really cool is that there’s been three or four detections there also, and we’ve caught every bit of that material coming out of the primary grinder. And so they’re a lot more confident that going into the secondary grinder, their product is a lot cleaner today than it used to be.

HG: Sounds like all those pieces were pretty small too.

PH: Some are. The green rubber glove was about two millimeters, like I said.

The plastic tape was a lot larger than that, but again, it’s incredibly difficult to find something that when light goes through it and reflects back to the camera that you can actually find something that’s clear. But in this case, it was very evident that’s what it was in the picture and it was easily pulled out of the reject bin.

HG: That’s awesome. 

FM Detection “A-ha Moments” from Customers Using PPO’s System

HG: You talked a little bit about making believers out of the customer. So they find that tiny little piece of green glove or they look and they go, “Oh my gosh. You found that box tape? Thank you! But how did you do that?”

What are the moments that you sometimes see with customers in a plant? So they now have a form of tech material detection system that works and what makes them kinda go, “Wow, this is awesome.”

PH: Well, so we perform what’s called a site acceptance test with every one of our machines. And during that site acceptance test, we are running products – their actual physical form materials – through the machine to prove that we will meet our guarantees that we give to customers. So we were running a piece of, I think it was about three millimeters is what the guarantee was for the system. And it was a blue rubber glove of some sort.

And during the middle of the test, we decided that – hey, it caught every one of them just fine. And we have pretty high confidence in that particular model anyway. But the really cool part was I decided, Why not? We’ve already achieved our 100%. So let’s go ahead when we run these other models. Let’s just include a piece of that. But I took that piece and cut it in half.

So we ran it through and it cut it every time. And then I took the piece that I cut in half and I cut it in half again. And so now we’re down to about 0.75 millimeters and it’s getting pretty hard to even see.

And yet, every time it went through the machine, it caught it. The little yellow square from Insights, just the region of interest, was just nailing it every time. And there was a gentleman there that was doing the test with us from the company that we’re working with. And he’s from their corporate office and he’s been somewhat neutral about it for a while. But that was his moment. It’s like – wow! That is some pretty tiny stuff. I can’t even find it, but yet it’s nailing it every time. 

And, we have seen a few of those foreign material examples in production already at that particular plant that have been the small pieces and he still calls me just about every time and goes, did you see that? Because that was pretty amazing.

How Customers Are Using PPO Insights

HG: You mentioned Insights, Philip. So, how does Insights help customers get to that moment? Does it give them any sort of additional information that maybe helps them?

PH: Sure. It can be used for a couple of things. One of them for sure is that it helps quickly identify what it is you’re trying to find. And then there’s also a feedback loop that you can type things in there. You can tell it what you found when you pulled the foreign material out. And you can put that back in there and it helps us to build the model a little bit more robust.

So, yeah, the little region of interest square that we put around the product quickly allows you to get to where it’s located on the process and pull it out, verify it, take a picture of it – whatever you have to do for quality assurance reasons. Write it up, take it off the material, get it back into production. You really don’t lose any materials in production, but you definitely get rid of the foreign material. If that’s the way you choose to do things. 

The other thing it can do is it can greatly help you with troubleshooting your whole system.

If you’re getting too many false rejects, it could be very easily because your calibration was slightly off and that’s very easily seen when you pull up Insights with a line that runs right down a certain place on the camera. And it just means that there was something on the window that, before it gets to the lens, you just have to clean it off and get it done. But you’re able to quickly get back into business that way.

HG: Got it. Okay. So it’s really a tool for helping not only to address operational issues, but actually identify and understand what the four materials are that are coming through the facility and coming through that machine.

FM Inspection Epiphanies

HG: Philip, you’ve been in meat processing facilities your whole career. What epiphanies have you had about foreign materials since working at PPO?

PH: Well, I don’t think there’s anybody in the industry that would come back and tell you that foreign materials are a non issue in any plant. We understand that they are present.

I think the epiphany, for me, was after seeing several of these machines in the field. The very first time I saw one and it caught a couple of things in one week or two weeks, whatever it was, it was interesting. But when you start to compile that and your first week you’ve caught twelve or thirteen different items. And before that, the plant was saying, “Well, yeah, we sometimes find like one a week,” you suddenly realize that the problem is a little bit bigger or more spread out than you really realized it could be. 

And, again, it’s because we’ve all relied on humans to try to do this inspection. And we’re just not capable of doing that at the speeds that we’re running across the conveyors. It’s not possible.

But when you really see how much it actually takes out of the system, it’s pretty amazing. There was even one of our customers that her comment was, “You know, this has always been here. We’ve just never been able to detect it. And now that we are, I sleep better at night.”  And I think that’s a really good compliment.

HG: Absolutely. Well, and hopefully, as we start to see more PPO systems in the field, there’ll be more people, including consumers like us, who are sleeping better at night knowing that some of those materials are not getting out into the grocery stores.

Advice for Dealing With Foreign Materials

HG: So as a meat industry expert, especially knowing what you know now, what would you tell another person in your field in the meat industry if they’re struggling with foreign materials?

PH: Well, I think you have to consider that they’re there. And, you know, if we’re all honest, we’re going to admit that they’re there. I mean, we wear rubber gloves, we wear cotton gloves, we have cardboard that we put product in, we have pallets we put product on. The chances of it actually occurring are not limited at all. They’re very much in front of your face.

So, if you were having a struggle with it, the first thing that I would do is make sure that you have as many of the processes that you can. We have several customers that use what’s called a triple hurdle process where they use an x-ray, a metal detector, and our Smart Imaging System. And between those three, downline, they’ve had zero foreign material incidents for well over two years.

I know that sounds fairly incredible to a lot of people, but it is possible today because of the ability to find the things that we couldn’t find yesterday. And I think as the industry catches on to that, it will become more prevalent that we will be able to find more and more. But if you’re having a struggle with it, I would seriously ask that you you seriously consider:

1. How does it come into your plant and can you change it?

2. Where does it go from the point of inspection and are you reintroducing materials that you would have taken out already? 

Because if you are, you’re really hampering your own form of material process in your plant.

HG: Got it. Okay.

Foreign Material Detection Trends in the Meat Industry

HG: one last question for you, Philip. Looking ahead, what do you see in the meat industry happening with foreign materials? Any trends you’re seeing or what do you see being the direction things are going?

PH: There seems to be a lot more prevalence of foreign materials causing recalls. I know that a lot of the industry has been talking to one another and they have various seminars and they meet together and they discuss foreign materials, especially among the larger groups that actually have a brand to protect.

And that, of course, is your confidence in food supply as a consumer is greatly related to not seeing recalls for any reason. And so, foreign material recalls don’t just hurt whoever has the recall. They hurt the entire industry.

My concern with it is that there’s a possibility that other things besides metal would be declared as an adulterant. And if that were the case, then there’s going to be a whole lot more cost. So, if they’re not addressing it today…

I know many of our potential customers and customers have put in lots of time and effort addressing this particular situation, and they bring in smaller suppliers to bring product to them and ask them to look at the very same things that we’re looking at. Try to get this out of the system before it gets there. Try to keep this from becoming a point of interest so much that somebody else has to step in and force that out of the system in some fashion. 

Because we live in an industry where [foreign materials] are very much present where we are. And we have to fix it or somebody else will help us fix it and that won’t be pleasant.

HG: So, really, it sounds to me like what you’re saying is the future looks like more effort, more investment, more opportunities for technology because people aren’t necessarily able to do what needs to be done. And we’re not able to prevent all the things that we need to with the approaches that are being used in most plants today.

PH: That is correct. Very much so.

HG: Got it. That was super insightful. Thanks, Philip. I’m really glad you’re out there in the plant making sure those pesky foreign materials don’t end up on our plates.

Don’t forget to check out the other videos in our Behind the Scenes series, including our video with Olga Pawluczyk, the CEO of PPO, as she explains a little more about how PPO’s technology does its magic in the plant.

See you next time.