A leading producer of tortillas for quick-service restaurants and retailers alike, Catallia Mexican Foods of Eagan, MN, has relied on metal detection for product inspection purposes since it opened its doors in 2006. But in recent years the peculiarities that are inherent in tortilla production convinced management that it might be time to investigate X-Ray technology.
What peculiarities? For starters, it's a warm, wet, salty environment. But when the production line needed to be stopped, the product temperature would dip, which in turn caused false rejects by the metal detector. An operator would have to adjust the equipment for rework and then adjust it back for normal production. Also problematic was that seemingly small changes to the product or the environment, like a folded-over tortilla, was causing false rejects on occasion.
On top of these production line challenges, major customers were requiring more sensitive detection capability, and they wanted the ability to detect non-metallic contaminants. Such expectations are not uncommon among today's retailers, for whom brand protection standards are crucial.
So Catallia management looked into X-Ray technology and installed a solution from us on one of its most demanding production lines.
By opening itself up to the exploration of new technologies in product inspection, Catallia has put itself in position to best serve the needs of its large portfolio of customers. It's all a matter of taking responsibility for deciding which technology is best suited for each application and customer. This is how metal detection and X-Ray came to coexist in the Catallia plant.
The firm has also embraced another Fanchi technology, ideal for baked goods, by incorporating the Checkweigher. This checkweigher, designed for dry applications, has all the right features to enable the company to avoid overfills and underfills while meeting packaging weight requirements 100 percent of the time with a more cost-effective solution than an all-purpose checkweigher.
